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-