I am writing a bash script and encountered this argument -I in answers here and here but I do not understand what it does. The manual is also not clear to me.
The second answer also states the following text which I also don't understand:
find /thisdir -type f -name "*.ogg" -print0 | xargs -0 -Imysongs mv -i mysongs /somedirThe
-Iin the above command tellsxargswhat replacement string you want to use (otherwise it adds the arguments to the end of the command).
Yeah, it is kind of roundabout description, but ultimately it is very simple: -I defines a pattern. That pattern would be searched in the remaining of the command line and replaced with an input from stdin.
In the example you shown:
xargs -0 -Imysongs mv -i mysongs /somedir The -I defines a pattern "mysongs", that pattern is searched in the rest of command line.
In you example, find produces a list of .ogg files. These files are coming to xarg. So for each file name found by find, the xarg will create and execute command
mv -i <filename> /somedir 
