Life-Changing Use of xargs

January 25, 2018 - One minute read - 84 words

Once, on Facebook I wrote:

vim has a strange way of working with data from xargs. To make vim happy, you need xargs to send the output into a TTY before handing it to vim. Per the xargs man page:

 -o      Reopen stdin as /dev/tty in the child process before executing
         the command.  This is useful if you want xargs to
         run an interactive application.

Extract file names based on STDOUT and then throw them to vim via xargs

$ grep -o '\[C.*)' https://t.co/KdKaLY85cm  |sed 's/.*(\(.*\))/\1/' |xargs -o vim

modern_times
programming
unix