David Pickett wrote: << I also wrote a simpler, line oriented, faster xargs, fxargs! >>
I've been quite pleased with an xargs wrapper I wrote that basically converts newlines to nuls, and then invokes either "xargs" or, if asked to run multiple threads, "parallel --xargs", passing all the "xargs" arguments to "xargs --null". I got all the exit status's and such just right, and preferred having all the xargs options available, once this hack worked around the confused space character handling of xargs without the --null option. I call my wrapper "x", a short name since I use it a lot, having been a regular xargs user since it was added to Version 7 Unix, inside Bell Labs, back around 1978. You can find my wrapper at: http://thepythoniccow.us/x.c By the way, even the original author of xargs, Herb Gellis, agrees that its interface is somewhat borked. See a note Gellis posted a decade after writing xargs, which I include in the above "x.c" source. An amusing bit of history ... -- Paul Jackson p...@usa.net
