what is xargs rm -f in node pre install

Question

I am facing an issue in building our code on a windows machine, this seems to be working fine in mac book, can anyone help me to understand what this line does in code building, and is there any windows alternative to this?

"preinstall": "find ./node_modules -maxdepth 1 -type l | xargs rm -f"

Answer 1

find ./node_modules -maxdepth 1 -type l

Runs the find command to search starting from the path specified for the specified things. The arguments tell you where and what it is looking for:

• ./node_modules: look under the directory ./node_modules
• -maxdepth 1: limit the search to a depth of 1 (so only looks in node_modules and not any subdirectories)
• -type l: look for files of type l (symlinks)

this will print out all the matching files -- all the symlinks in ./node_modules and that list is the piped to the xargs command:

xargs rm -f

which runs the command rm -f with each input (file from the find command) as an additional argument.

So overall, this just removes all symlinks in the directory ./node_modules. However, since it doesn't quote anything, it will misbehave if you have any filename containing spaces.