Editing Xargs (section)

===Shell trick: any number===
Another way to achieve a similar effect is to use a shell as the launched command, and deal with the complexity in that shell, for example:
<syntaxhighlight lang="shell-session">
$ mkdir ~/backups
$ find /path -type f -name '*~' -print0 | xargs -0 sh -c 'for filename; do cp -a "$filename" ~/backups; done' sh
</syntaxhighlight>

The word {{code|sh}} at the end of the line is for the [[POSIX shell]] {{code|sh -c}} to fill in for {{code|$0}}, the "executable name" part of the positional parameters (argv). If it weren't present, the name of the first matched file would be instead assigned to <code>$0</code> and the file wouldn't be copied to <code>~/backups</code>. One can also use any other word to fill in that blank, {{code|my-xargs-script}} for example.

Since {{code|cp}} accepts multiple files at once, one can also simply do the following:
<syntaxhighlight lang="shell-session">
$ find /path -type f -name '*~' -print0 | xargs -0 sh -c 'if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then cp -a "$@" ~/backup; fi' sh
</syntaxhighlight>
This script runs {{code|cp}} with all the files given to it when there are any arguments passed. Doing so is more efficient since only one invocation of {{code|cp}} is done for each invocation of {{code|sh}}.