According to the man page, xargs will quit if one of the execution lines exits with an error of 255:
If any invocation of the command exits with a status of 255, xargs will stop immediately without reading any further input. An error message is issued on stderr when this happens.
How can I get xargs to not do this?
I have a 1500 or so line batch job that I want to run, 50 lines at a time. I was finding that it was always dying at a certain line, and not completing the job. Not good!
An even better question, the question describing what I am trying to do, is:
How can I run a 1500 line batch script, 50 lines at a time, so that it does not quit the job in the middle, and so that the output is captured to a log file of some kind?
Best Answer
You could wrap the perl script with another simple bash script:
This will call real-command passing it all the parameters that you pass to this fake-command and it will always return a 0 exit code (that means it is always successful) and xargs will never stop with this.