GNU xargs is missing the -J option. WHY!?!

I find that using an idiom like

is so useful. It replaces the replstr (“%” in this example) with all the arguments at once, or as many as can fit without going over the system’s limit. I couldn’t believe it when I learned that the GNU version of xargs lacks this flag. Yes, it’s only on the BSD xargs as far as I can tell.

Every time I’ve searched, someone suggests using the -I flag on GNU xargs instead, but they are not quite the same. The -I flag substitutes the replstr one argument at a time, so that in the earlier example, instead of executing

only once, with the -I flag it will instead do

I’ve also tried using the -n and -L flags, but they are mutually exclusive with each other and with -I. OK, so we need some kind of klugey workaround.

This adds the “bar/” suffix to the standard input before adding it to the end of the mv command. “But,” you say, “those strings are supposed to be null-terminated!” True, but we’re providing a suffix rather than an extra replacement argument, so the EOF signaled from the input stream is really all we need.

There’s another, more intuitive way, but harder to get right; get the argument list output from a subshell command:

But this suffers from not handling weird file names the right way. Instead one could do:

This actually works better for file names, but lacks the flexibility of find.

Is this stuff really what we ought to do? Just give us the -J, GNU. If you know a different way to deal with this, tweet me @realgeek and I’ll update this post.