How to ignore xargs commands if stdin input is empty?

Bash Problem Overview

Consider this command:

ls /mydir/*.txt | xargs chown root

The intention is to change owners of all text files in mydir to root

The issue is that if there are no .txt files in mydir then xargs thows an error saying there is no path specified. This is a harmless example because an error is being thrown, but in some cases, like in the script that i need to use here, a blank path is assumed to be the current directory. So if I run that command from /home/tom/ then if there is no result for ls /mydir/*.txt and all files under /home/tom/ have their owners changed to root.

So how can I have xargs ignore an empty result?

Bash Solutions

Solution 1 - Bash

For GNU xargs, you can use the -r or --no-run-if-empty option:

> --no-run-if-empty
-r
If the standard input does not contain any nonblanks, do not run the command. Normally, the command is run once even if there is no input. This option is a GNU extension.

The BSD version of xargs, which is used on macOS, does not run the command for an empty input, so the -r option is not needed (nor is it accepted by that version of xargs).

Solution 2 - Bash

Users of non-GNU xargs may take advantage of -L <#lines>, -n <#args>, -i, and -I <string>:

ls /empty_dir/ | xargs -n10 chown root # chown executed every 10 args or fewer
ls /empty_dir/ | xargs -L10 chown root # chown executed every 10 lines or fewer
ls /empty_dir/ | xargs -i cp {} {}.bak # every {} is replaced with the args from one input line
ls /empty_dir/ | xargs -I ARG cp ARG ARG.bak # like -i, with a user-specified placeholder

Keep in mind that xargs splits the line at whitespace but quoting and escaping are available; RTFM for details.

Also, as Doron Behar mentions, this workaround isn't portable so checks may be needed:

$ uname -is
SunOS sun4v
$ xargs -n1 echo blah < /dev/null

$ uname -is
Linux x86_64
$ xargs --version | head -1
xargs (GNU findutils) 4.7.0-git
$ xargs -n1 echo blah < /dev/null
blah

Solution 3 - Bash

man xargs says --no-run-if-empty.

Solution 4 - Bash

In terms of xargs, you can use -r as suggested, however it's not supported by BSD xargs.

So as workaround you may pass some extra temporary file, for example:

find /mydir -type f -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 chown root $(mktemp)

or redirect its stderr into null (2> /dev/null), e.g.

find /mydir -type f -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 chown root 2> /dev/null || true

Another better approach is to iterate over found files using while loop:

find /mydir -type f -name "*.txt" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
  chown -v root "$file"
done

Also please note that your method of changing the permissions isn't great and it's discouraged. Definitely you shouldn't parse output of ls command (see: Why you shouldn't parse the output of ls). Especially when you're running your command by root, because your files can consist special characters which may be interpreted by the shell or imagine the file having a space character around /, then the results can be terrible.

Therefore you should change your approach and use find command instead, e.g.

find /mydir -type f -name "*.txt" -execdir chown root {} ';'

Solution 5 - Bash

A cross-platform (Mac and Linux) alternative to using -r/--no-run-if-empty xargs' parameter:

Example with empty parameters (same result on Ubuntu 18.04 and Big Sur):

$ echo | xargs -I {}  echo "This is a test with '{}'"
$
$
$ cat /dev/null | xargs -I {}  echo "This is a test with '{}'"
$

Example with multiple lines:

$ seq 1 5  | xargs -I {}  echo "This is a test with '{}'"
This is a test with '1'
This is a test with '2'
This is a test with '3'
This is a test with '4'
This is a test with '5'
$

Solution 6 - Bash

This is a behaviour of GNU xargs which can be supressed by using -r, --no-run-if-empty.

The *BSD variant of xargs has this behavoir on default, so -r is not needed. Since FreeBSD 7.1 (released in january 2009) an -r argument is accepted (witch does nothing) for compatiblity reasons.

I personally prefer using longopts in scripts but since the *BSD xargs does not uses longopts just use "-r" and xargs will act the same on *BSD an on linux systems

xargs on MacOS (currently MacOS Mojave) sadly don't supports the "-r" argument.

Solution 7 - Bash

On OSX: Bash reimplementation of xargs dealing with the -r argument, put that e.g. in $HOME/bin and add it to the PATH:

#!/bin/bash
stdin=$(cat <&0)
if [[ $1 == "-r" ]] || [[ $1 == "--no-run-if-empty" ]]
then
    # shift the arguments to get rid of the "-r" that is not valid on OSX
    shift
    # wc -l return some whitespaces, let's get rid of them with tr
    linecount=$(echo $stdin | grep -v "^$" | wc -l | tr -d '[:space:]') 
    if [ "x$linecount" = "x0" ]
    then
      exit 0
    fi
fi

# grep returns an error code for no matching lines, so only activate error checks from here
set -e
set -o pipefail
echo $stdin | /usr/bin/xargs $@

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	HyderA	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Bash	Sven Marnach	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Bash	arielCo	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Bash	thiton	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Bash	kenorb	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Bash	alfredocambera	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Bash	Mirko Steiner	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 7 - Bash	rcomblen	View Answer on Stackoverflow