Question

Are they any equivalent under OSX to the xargs -r under Linux ? I’m trying to find a way to interupt a pipe if there’s no data.

For instance imagine you do the following:

touch test
cat test | xargs -r echo "content: "

That doesn’t yield any result because xargs interrupts the pipe.

Is there either some hidden xargs option or something else to achieve the same result under OSX?

Answer 1

You can use test or [:

if [ -s test ] ; then cat test | xargs echo content: ; fi