bedtime question : xargs

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009, David A. Bandel wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:59 PM, Vu Pham <vu at sivell.com> wrote:
>> Using xargs, how can I pipe the output ( of some command ) as the *first*
>> parameter of some other command ?
>>
>> Here is my problem: I have various rpm files in a directory tree. I want to
>> copy all of these files to a remote server using scp. What I am thinking is
>>
>> [oliver at xen2vm4 redhat]$ find . -name "*.rpm"
>> ./SRPMS/hello-1.0.0-2.src.rpm
>> ./SRPMS/hello-1.0.0-1.src.rpm
>> ./RPMS/i686/hello-1.0.0-2.i686.rpm
>> ./RPMS/i686/hello-1.0.0-1.i686.rpm
>>
>>
>> # find . -name "*.rpm" | xargs  scp  ???   root at remoteserver:
>
>why invoke xargs at all?
>find . -name \*.rpm -exec scp {} root at remoteserver: \;
>(note:  the \; is required)

Better yet, why not use rsync?  It is more efficient than scp
when files may exist on the remote machine, uses ssh when not
using its own modules (e.g. host::module), and using modules can
be done reasonably safely without ssh by restricting the IP
addresses of hosts allowed to send data.

Bill
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