I felt bad using contrived examples, but I wanted a short post to cover the basics of xargs without getting detracted with discussions of the options of find. Based on the feedback I've seen here I'll go ahead and update the post though. If you can share some simple but less contrived examples please let me know, I'd love to update the post.
Don't get me wrong; it's a perfectly good and useful tutorial. The meat comes at the end when you talk about parallelism and argument batching. That can make a world of difference when you're working on real-world problems, like moving millions of files (mv * won't work unless you're on a system without ARG_MAX, and even then there are performance implications).
I think a good intro to xargs starts with a list of things that you can't do without it. (Easy for me to say that, but of course I haven't written that piece...) It'd be great to know why to use it, not just how, you know what I mean?
Anyway, this is just off-the-cuff commentary, not criticism. Thanks for writing it up.
