Make xargs pass as first parameter

I’m trying to produce this behaviour:

grep 192.168.1 *.txt

By passing a string into grep via Xargs but it is going on the end instead of as the first parameter.

echo 192.168.1 | xargs grep  *.txt

I need to tell xargs (or something similar) to put the incoming string between ‘grep’ and ‘*’ instead of on the end.

How do I do this?

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Answers:

Method 1

Example

Method 2

Answers:

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Method 1

$ echo 192.168.1. | xargs -I{} grep {} *.txt

Example

Sample files:

$ cat {1..3}.txt
192.168.1
192.168.1
192.168.1

Example run:

$ echo 192.168.1. | xargs -I{} grep {} *.txt
1.txt:192.168.1.
2.txt:192.168.1.
3.txt:192.168.1.

Method 2

Another approach:

find . -name *.txt -print0 | xargs -0 grep 192.168.1

This will not overflow the shell’s command line length with too many file names. To avoid confusing xargs/grep with file names that have spaces, -print0 and -0 options will delineate each found name with a null rather than a LF.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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