Modifying replace string in xargs

Question

When I am using xargs sometimes I do not need to explicitly use the replacing string:

find . -name \"*.txt\" | xargs rm -rf

In oth

Answer 1

Adding on that the wikipedia article is surprisingly informative

for example:

Shell trick

Another way to achieve a similar effect is to use a shell as the launched command, and deal with the complexity in that shell, for example:

$ mkdir ~/backups
$ find /path -type f -name '*~' -print0 | xargs -0 bash -c 'for filename; do cp -a "$filename" ~/backups; done' bash

Answer 2

The following command constructs the move command with xargs, replaces the second occurrence of '.' with '.bar.', then executes the commands with bash, working on mac OSX.

ls *.txt | xargs -I {} echo mv {} foo/{} | sed 's/\./.bar./2' | bash