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cd; rm -f test/*.*
ln -s -f -t test~test ~/workshop/data/*.txt
ls -l

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• find returns a list of matching file paths on its standard output
• the paths are piped to the standard input of xargs
• xargs takes the data on its standard input and calls the specified function (here ln) with that data as the function's argument list.
  
  

cd; rm -f test/*.*
find ~/workshop/ -name "*.txt" | xargs ln -s -f -t ~/test

sort & uniq tricks

The ~/test/joblist.txt file you just symlink'd describes sequencing job/run pairs, tab-separated. We can use sort and uniq to collapse and count entries in the run name field (column 2):

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