There is also a recent POSIX interp which is relevant.

This is also reported as <http://bugs.debian.org/231480>.

FWIW I do think that this is not only a mising feature but a real bug. "xargs -i -L10" silently acts as "xargs -L10". I'd rather have it bail out with "conflicting options instead". A command-line using -i will not work at all if -i is ignored, as the arguments are given in the wrong order and additionally a literal {} is passed along as argument, too.

(I'd prefer having -i and -L as non-conflicting options, though.)

I can't xargs to work as I would expect it when I give it both the ‘-i’ and ‘-l’ args.  Using ‘-i’ specifies ‘-l1’ (as the documentation indicates) and using ‘-l’ seems to disable the functionality provided by ‘-i’.

This can be evidenced by using the following program:

main ( int argc, char **argv ) { int i; for (i = 0; i < argc; i ++) { printf("Arg %d: [%s]\n", i, argv[i]); } }

When I build it and run it from xargs, I get the following:

> echo -e 'a\nb\nc' | xargs -l10 -i ./test {}

Arg 0: [./test]
Arg 1: [a]
Arg 0: [./test]
Arg 1: [b]
Arg 0: [./test]
Arg 1: [c]

> echo -e 'a\nb\nc' | xargs -i -l10 ./test {}

Arg 0: [./test]
Arg 1: [{}]
Arg 2: [a]
Arg 3: [b]
Arg 4: [c]

>

I was expecting to be able to combine ‘-i’ and ‘-l’ to get:

Arg 0: [./test]
Arg 1: [a]
Arg 2: [b]
Arg 3: [c]

I don't see anything in the semantics of ‘-i’ and ‘-l’ that makes them exclude each other.  Of course, in ‘-i’, the replace string (‘{}’) would get replaced with as many tokens from the input as permitted.