Dear xargs,

How’s it going? I just had to drop a line and give credit where it’s due. I’m still amazed by your power and finesse in the Unix world after all these years. You’re a gem when it comes to crafting elegant commands that handle tons of inputs effortlessly.

Let me take you back to when I first discovered your usefulness. Picture this: I had a massive heap of image files scattered all over the place, and I needed to resize them without losing my sanity. Manually handling each file would’ve been a nightmare, but then there you were, like a trusty old buddy:

find /path/to/images -type f -name "*.jpg" | xargs convert -resize 800x600

Smooth as whiskey, you took every image file and passed it to the convert command, knocking out the resizing task in one go. I owe you big time for that.

As time went on, I came to appreciate even more of your practicality. Like that time when I had a bunch of log files scattered everywhere, and I needed to find a needle in the haystack – a specific error message.

That’s when you stepped in to save the day:

find /var/log -type f -name "*.log" | xargs grep "ERROR: Something went wrong"

You went through each log file, looked for the error message, and made my life a whole lot easier. Can’t deny, you’ve got some serious skills.

But here’s the kicker – when I met jq, it was like a match made in Unix heaven. That little fella can handle JSON data like nobody’s business. And you know what? You two make a hell of a team!

Let me give you a solid example of the magic you and jq can whip up together.

Say I have this giant JSON file filled with records of online orders, and I needed to pluck out the names of customers who splurged more than a grand:

cat orders.json | jq -r '.[] | select(.total_price > 1000) | .customer_name' \
    | xargs -I {} echo "Thank you, {} for your valuable purchase!"

Let’s go! jq does its JSON wizardry, filters out the high rollers, and hands the names to you, old reliable xargs. You then proceed to send each one a heartfelt “thank you” message. Damn good stuff.

So, here’s the deal – I thought you two should meet. You know, team up and conquer even more Unix challenges. With jq capturing, reshaping, and feeding data to you, I imagine the possibilities are endless.

Anyways, just wanted to give a nod to your awesomeness, xargs. You’ve been a trusty companion throughout my Unix journey, and I’m grateful for the simplicity and efficiency you bring to the table.

Keep on rockin’,

An xargs fan