xargs vs. exec {}

October 29, 2006

There is a bit of a debate in some circles about using xargs vs. the -exec {} option that’s built into find itself. To me, however, it’s not much of a debate; -exec isn’t nearly as good as xargs for what I use find for. I tend to use it to perform tasks involving many files. “Move all these files there”, “copy all those directories there”, “Delete these links.”, etc.

That’s all nice and stuff, but you probably want to see it in action, right? Let’s run some numbers. Below is a listing of 1,668 .jpg files on my OS X system using both -exec and xargs:



time find . -name "*.jpg" -exec ls {} ;

real    0m6.618s
user    0m1.465s
sys     0m4.396s

Hmm, that’s not bad — seven seconds for over around 1,600 files, right? Let’s try it with xargs.

# time find . -name "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs -0 ls
real    0m1.120s
user    0m0.594s
sys     0m0.527s

That’s one (1) second vs seven (7) seconds. Seriously; xargs is the way to go.

xargs vs. exec {}

time find . -name "*.jpg" -exec ls {} ;

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