Bash – How to get the current line count from xargs

bashshellxargs

I want to grab every 5 images in a directory and merge them together into a new file with a unique filename per 5 image group.

find *.jpg | xargs -n 5 -i convert {} -append {#}.png

This is really close but the {#} doesn't output the current line count. Is this even possible with xargs?

Best Answer

If the filenames does not contain whitespaces:

Dry run:

find *.jpg | xargs -n 5 | awk '{OFS=" ";}{print "convert",$1,$2,$3,$4,$5,"-append",NR".png\n";}'

If everything looks okay, append | sh.

Related Solutions

How to prevent arguments to `xargs` from being prefixed with spaces

Use -I {}, and {} at the place where you want the argument to appear:

xargs -I {} -n 1 echo rm /usr/src/packages/{}

(You can use something other than {}, {} is just very common.)

Without this, xargs simpy adds the input as additional arguments, so it's not a question of it adding spaces anywhere - the command receives the input as separate arguments.

You probably should use find instead of ls, especially if you want to distinguish files and directories.

Something like this to delete only files:

find . -type f -exec rm /usr/src/packages/{} \;

Best Answer

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How to prevent arguments to `xargs` from being prefixed with spaces

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