Replacement for xargs -d in osx

Question

In Linux, you can use xargs -d, to quickly run the hostname command against four different servers with sequential names as follows:

echo -n 1,2,3,4 |xargs -d, -I{} ssh root@www{}.example.com hostname

It looks like the OSX xargs command does not support the delimiter parameter. Can you achieve the same result with a differently formatted echo, or through some other command-line utility?

Answer 1

How about:

echo {1..4} | xargs -n1 -I{} ssh root@www{}.example.com hostname

From man xargs:

-n number
Set the maximum number of arguments taken from standard input for each invocation of utility.

Answer 2

Alternatively, you can always install GNU xargs through Homebrew and the GNU findutils package.

Install Homebrew:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Follow the instructions. Then install findutils:

brew install findutils

This will give you GNU xargs as gxargs, and you can use the syntax you're accustomed to from GNU/Linux. The same goes for other basic commands found in the findutils package such as gfind or glocate or gupdatedb, which have different BSD counterparts on OS X.

Answer 3

If you want it run in parallel, use GNU Parallel:

parallel ssh root@www{}.example.com hostname ::: {1..4}

Answer 4

You can also use tr in OSX to convert the commas to new lines and use xargs to enumerate through each item as follows:

echo -n 1,2,3,4 | tr -s ',' '\n' | xargs -I{} ssh root@www{}.example.com hostname

Answer 5

with printf

$ printf '%s\n' 1 2 3 4 | xargs -I{} echo ssh root@www{}.example.com hostname
ssh [e-mail] hostname
ssh [e-mail] hostname
ssh [e-mail] hostname
ssh [e-mail] hostname