On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 12:26, Mike McCarty wrote:
| pipe to another program xargs not familiar with this program, sorry but looking at it, it looks like it's essentially the same as -exec
It's much more efficient than exec for programs that accept multiple filenames on the command line. It takes a list from stdin and puts reasonably-sized bunches on the command line of the specified program so you don't have to start the program for every file or worry about exceeding command line size limits.
vim sorry, not familiar with vim
It's an enhanced vi. But sed or ed could probably do this job.
God, please save us from "clever" programmers.
Famous quote: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Kernighan
Some other interesting comments on the topic of simplicity and not re-inventing old mistakes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy