[sjs]

It's most common use is to take some stuff on stdin and then use those as arguments to a command. Here is a fancy way to do `ls * `[1] using xargs:

    find . -print | xargs ls

`find` dumps the results to stdout, the pipe shuttles `find`'s stdout to `xargs` stdin, `xargs` uses its stdin as arguments for `ls`.

(Don't run this in your home directory)

[1] Pedants will realize this is actually equivalent to `ls .* *` as hidden files are found by `find`.

[BrandonM]

Maybe you'll call me a pedant, but you should be aware that `find .` is not equivalent to `ls .* *`. The find command starts at the indicated directories (. in this case) and lists each file and directory within it, recursing into subdirectories. You can use things like -type, -[i]name, and -mtime to filter the results, as well as -mindepth and -maxdepth to constrain the traversal.

Note also that "-print" is the default command for find, so you can leave it off. Other commands include -print0 (NUL-delimited instead of newline-delimited) and -exec.