hosted services

xargs is awesome. Send it some data parameters, it'll make very few invocations of a cmdline with data as the arguments.

Consider moving files older than one year to directory 'd', the simplest and most efficient method that comes to my mind is using find and xargs:

$ find . -maxdepth 0 -mtime +365 | xargs mv -t d

Nice isn't it.

sleeping

There is one lacking feature that I know of with the xargs program, this is that it doesn't by default delay between invocations of cmdline, that is, until I did a bit of minor hacking and in a couple of lines I'd produced a patch file. I've not make doc changes so I doubt it'll make it past a git commit. Anyway, it's available in /code/findutils.

It's really quite simple, just adds --delay/-D to the options.

For example, lets finger three people once every five seconds (your system might have a different user UID starting point than 500 but this is just purely for example):

awk -F: '{ if( $3 > 500 ) { print $1 } }' /etc/passwd | xargs -l3 -D5 finger

Anyway, I'm quite pleased with this, I don't know why I hadn't thought of it sooner really as it's very simple.