Apparently, though unproven, at 00:49 on Thursday 18 November 2010, Adam
Carter did opine thusly:
> I wasnt familiar with + but it changes the default behavior of this;
> find /path -name something -exec ls -lS {} \;
> which will run ls -lS once for each file, and therefore Sort doesnt work as
> its only sorting a single file
>
> find /patch -name something -exec -ls -lS +
> which runs ls -lS once against all the files that find finds (added as
> additional arguments), and therefore Sort works.
Almost right.
-exec + will not append all filenames found and run one command,
it will append the maximum number of filenames that do not exceed the shell
command line limit, and do that enough times to get through all the filenames.
You will be surprised how easy it is to get a directory with enough files in
it to exceed the shell command length limit (65535 chars?). I have several
users who will gladly show you how it's done, and will show you where they
have each done it in multiple places
--
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
