On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 10:52:37AM -0700, giuseppe.amatu...@gmail.com wrote: > find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -n 1 -P 10 bash -c 'echo > "$1" '
> do not print $1 so the argument (-n 1) is not passed inside. OK, first thing: you omitted the -0 on xargs. Next, please realize that I'm not accustomed to this -n -P stuff at all, so it's not clear what you're trying to accomplish beyond the basic mechanics of passing the filenames to bash. You want to print filenames 10 at a time in parallel? It's a weird question. If you want the filename to be given as an argument to bash, you actually need a placeholder after the -c 'script' part. The first argument after the script becomes $0, and then the arguments after that become $1, $2, etc. So: find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -P 10 bash -c 'echo "==start $$"; echo "$1"; echo "==end $$"' _ (I added echoes of the start/end of each invoked bash process so I could see what it's doing.)
