Return to Answer

To expand on the answers already provided, xargs can do one cool thing that is becoming increasingly important in today's multicore and distributed computing landscape: it can parallel process jobs.

For example:

$ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8

will encode *.wav => *.flac, using three processes at once (-P 3).

To expand on the answers already provided, xargs can do one cool thing that is becoming increasingly important in today's multicore and distributed computing landscape: it can parallel process jobs.

For example:

find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8

will encode *.wav => *.flac, using three processes at once (-P 3).

Update 2024:

GNU Parallel, initially released 2020-05-22, is another tool that may be better suited to parallelizing processes. Here's the same command as above using parallel instead:

find . -type f -name '*.wav' -exec parallel --jobs=3 flac -V8 ::: {} +

Omit --jobs=3 to auto-utilize all CPU threads at once.

To expand on the answers already provided, some xargs implementations (like GNU or modern BSDs) can do one cool thing that is becoming increasingly important in today's multicore and distributed computing landscape: it can parallel process jobs.

For example:

$ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8

will encode *.wav => *.flac, using three processes at once (-P 3).

To expand on the answers already provided, xargs can do one cool thing that is becoming increasingly important in today's multicore and distributed computing landscape: it can parallel process jobs.

For example:

$ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8

will encode *.wav => *.flac, using three processes at once (-P 3).

To expand on the answers already provided, xargs can do one cool thing that is becoming increasingly important in today's multicore and distributed computing landscape: it can parallel process jobs.

For example:

$ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8

will encode *.wav => *.flac, using three processes at once (-P 3).

To expand on the answers already provided, some xargs implementations (like GNU or modern BSDs) can do one cool thing that is becoming increasingly important in today's multicore and distributed computing landscape: it can parallel process jobs.

For example:

$ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8

will encode *.wav => *.flac, using three processes at once (-P 3).