xargs on windows: No such file or directory

Question

I wanted to resync the tags on my local git repository with the ones on our remote server, using this answer provided on StackOverflow:

git tag -l | xargs git tag -d
git fetch --tags

I've got git for windows portable installed which includes xargs from FindUtils for Windows (as best I can tell).

When I run the first part of the command, all I get is:

xargs: git: No such file or directory

If I modify the command to run:

git tag -l | xargs echo

It correctly "echos" the tags for me. So, my only conclusion is that xargs for some reason can't resolve executables from the path.

How can I get xargs to properly execute what's passed to it (without resorting to passing the full path to git.exe?)

Solution

I use the Gnu on Windows port of the Unix tools and get a similar problem to this but the error message is always Invalid argument, e.g.

> printf "Hello World!" | xargs printf "%s %s"
xargs: printf: Invalid argument

One solution appears to be to use the "proverbial" extra level of indirection, for example a shell such as cmd.exe, to actually invoke the command:

> printf "Hello World!" | xargs cmd /c printf "%s %s"
Hello World!

Comments

[itslittlejohn]

Did you ever resolve this issue? I'm seeing the same thing

[gerrod]

Nope, never got to the bottom of it :-|

[itslittlejohn]

Running the exact command in git bash worked fine, so I went with that. ¯_(ツ)_/¯