On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 05:28:22PM -0500, Jason Crawford wrote:
> Well in the case of /usr/src, I think you must MIGHT hit the maximum
> argument length for the shell by using xargs, unless you did it inside
> of each directory in /usr/src. That and well, explaining xargs to Dave
> will end up leading to another 20+ mail thread....

xargs runs the command multiple times when it hits this limit:

        [EMAIL PROTECTED] jot 0 | xargs echo | sed 's/ .*//'
        1
        5001
        10001
        15001
        20001
        25001
        ^C

The manual tries to describe this behavior:

        Any arguments specified on the command line are given to the utility 
upon
        each invocation, followed by some number of the arguments read from 
stan-
        dard input.  The utility is repeatedly executed one or more times until
        standard input is exhausted.

-Ray-

Reply via email to