Xargs

xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute command lines from standard input. Commands like grep and awk can accept the standard input as a parameter, or argument by using a pipe. However others like cp and echo disregard the standard input stream and rely solely on the arguments found after the command . Additionally, under the Linux kernel before version 2.6.23, arbitrarily long lists of parameters could not be passed to a command, so xargs breaks the list of arguments into sublists small enough to be acceptable.