xargs short-circuit

[Jilles Tjoelker]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 01:34:49PM -0500, Matthew Story wrote:
> After reading the man-page, and browsing around the internet for a minute,
> I was just wondering if there is an option in (any) xargs to short-circuit
> on first failure of [utility [arguments]].

> e.g.

> $ jot - 1 10 | xargs -e -n1 sh -c 'echo "$*"; echo exit 1' worker || echo $?
> 1
> 1

> such that any non-0 exit code in a child process would cause xargs to stop
> processing.  seems like this would be a nice feature to have.

As per xargs(1), you can do this by having the command exit on a signal
or with a value of 255.

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker