Shell xargs

xargs is a utility for passing a stdin stream into another set of commands.

# Remove all files that end with .zip
find . -name "*.zip" | xargs -I {} rm {}

# Print out the result of ls, just with spaces instead of tabs.
ls | xargs

Parallel processing

xargs can be used to perform actions in parallel rather than sequentially:

# -P 20 = Parallel with 20 workers
# -I {} = Replace "{}" in the command with the xargs input

printf "%s\n" "${links[@]}" | xargs -P 20 -I {} curl {}