What is "xargs"

xargs is a command on Unix and most Unix-like operating systems used to build and execute command lines from standard input. Commands such as [[grep]] and [[awk]] can accept the standard input as a parameter, or argument by using a pipe. However, others such as [[Cp (Unix)|cp]] and [[echo (command)|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, and under many other Unix-like systems, arbitrarily long lists of parameters cannot be passed to a command, so xargs breaks the list of arguments into sublists small enough to be acceptable.