Art of Shell

xargs is plumbing. It takes a stream of text, splits it on whitespace, and bolts the pieces onto another command. By default it spits them into echo, but the moment you point it at something real — rm, git, whatever — it turns into a batch-launcher. For example:

git diff --name-only --diff-filter=U | xargs -I {} git checkout --ours {}

This one-liner pulls out every conflicted file and runs git checkout --ours on each.

Art of Git Async Programming

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