Can xargs execute a subshell command for each argument?

bash xargs
adelphus picture adelphus · Mar 26, 2015 · Viewed 11.1k times · Source

I have a command which is attempting to generate UUIDs for files:

find -printf "%P\n"|sort|xargs -L 1 echo $(uuid)

But in the result, xargs is only executing the $(uuid) subshell once:

8aa9e7cc-d3b2-11e4-83a6-1ff1acc22a7e file1
8aa9e7cc-d3b2-11e4-83a6-1ff1acc22a7e file2
8aa9e7cc-d3b2-11e4-83a6-1ff1acc22a7e file3

Is there a one-liner (i.e not a function) to get xargs to execute a subshell command on each input?

Answer

hek2mgl picture hek2mgl · Mar 26, 2015

This is because the $(uuid) gets expanded in the current shell. You could explicitly call a shell:

find -printf "%P\n"| sort | xargs -I '{}' bash -c 'echo $(uuid) {}'

Btw, I would use the following command:

find -exec bash -c 'echo "$(uuid) ${1#./}"' -- '{}' \;

without xargs.

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