Pádraig Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The reason for this I think is so that one gets accurate totals, > as the following will only give subtotals for each invocation of wc, > if there are enough files to make the cmd line go above the max len. > > find -print0 | xargs --null wc
Right. > Might be worth adding text to that affect, > as I needed to think for a minute for the reason. > > That same can be said for du, or any > command that produces totals. Thanks. That reminds me: I have to update coreutils.texi :) The description of wc's --files0-from is nearly identical to that of du. I've added an example: Index: doc/coreutils.texi =================================================================== RCS file: /fetish/cu/doc/coreutils.texi,v retrieving revision 1.330 retrieving revision 1.331 diff -u -p -u -r1.330 -r1.331 --- doc/coreutils.texi 25 Jun 2006 06:55:08 -0000 1.330 +++ doc/coreutils.texi 26 Jun 2006 10:33:09 -0000 1.331 @@ -2961,6 +2961,28 @@ Print only the newline counts. @opindex --max-line-length Print only the maximum line lengths. [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] including files from @command{du} +Rather than processing files named on the command line, process those +named in file @var{FILE}; each name is terminated by a null byte. +This is useful when +the list of file names is so long that it may exceed a command line +length limitation. +In such cases, running @command{wc} via @command{xargs} is undesirable +because it splits the list into pieces and makes @command{wc} print a +total for each sublist rather than for the entire list. +One way to produce a list of null-byte-terminated file names is with @sc{gnu} [EMAIL PROTECTED], using its @option{-print0} predicate. For example, to find +the length of the longest line in any @file{.c} or @file{.h} file in the +current hierarchy, do this: + [EMAIL PROTECTED] +find . -name '*.[ch]' -print0 | ./wc -L --files=- | tail -n1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] example + +Do not specify any @var{FILE} on the command line when using this option. + @end table @exitstatus _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils