On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 08:56:00AM -0800, J C Nash wrote: > I wanted to convert all the ps files in a directory, so > tried > > ls *.ps | xargs ps2pdf > > but got the "usage" msg from ps2pdf. Tried a few alternative > with no joy and finally wrote a perl script that does a nice > job (available on request). However, I'd like to know why > xargs doesn't work here. ps2pdf doesn't take multiple .ps files as command line arguments (it only operates on one .ps file at a time). To run ps2pdf once for each .ps, you want something more like: ls *.ps | xargs -n 1 ps2pdf This will make xargs use no more than one argument for each invocation of ps2pdf. Cheers, Kevin.