# xargs Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/xargs/ 17 people recommended xargs in Hacker News comments, 5 had mixed feelings and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 12 months, in 8 threads. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Standard Unix tool that builds commands from piped input, used for parallel runs with -P and feeding find results. Caveat: options are easy to forget and filenames with spaces can break it. Summary written by Claude from 35 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 32 of those comments still count. ## Why people recommend it - Runs commands in parallel with -P (5 comments in the sample): "My go-to for fast and easy parallelization is xargs -P." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858933)) "I stick to xargs -P99 these days and am happier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986553)) "xargs can run parallel processes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48988685)) - Combines with find and shell tools (3 comments in the sample): "you can combine find with xargs (or parallel), which also handles it and optionally allows you to specify exactly how many arguments to process per…" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067923)) "It’s worth learning about swiss army utilities like xargs that make this easy (and fun" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091529)) "plain shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46180331)) - Handles spaces in filenames via null (2 comments in the sample): "Completely eliminates the problem of dealing with whitespace in the filenames." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987643)) "That won't save you from weird file names, but null termination will." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986938)) - Limits arguments per command call (2 comments in the sample): "I might not have written `el` if I had been aware of `xargs -n/--max-args=1" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48991774)) "when a lot of commands will take many targets for a single invocation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986927)) ## What people warn about - Options are hard to remember (3 comments in the sample): "I read the -I and -J options and my brain glazes over" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48985855)) "I spend the brain capacity on remembering the details on that rather than xargs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052940)) "I always have to look up find and xargs syntax." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432080)) - Breaks on odd filenames and {} substitution (3 comments in the sample): "you will want `xargs` but `{}` substitution is also very error-prone" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432020)) "xargs gets you the spaces in filenames landmine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48988329)) "i often find xargs ends up biting me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48989408)) ## Other command-line tools people recommend - [fzf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fzf/): 68 recommend, 7 mixed, 5 criticize - [GitHub CLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-cli/): 66 recommend, 10 mixed, 45 criticize - [grep](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grep/): 53 recommend, 9 mixed, 19 criticize - [Atuin](https://hackerapproved.com/p/atuin/): 51 recommend, 6 mixed, 21 criticize ## The badge A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged. ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "xargs", https://hackerapproved.com/p/xargs/ (17 recommend, 5 mixed, 7 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026). Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.