On 2/13/06, Stuart Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2006/02/13 17:28, 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 > > I haven't seen xargs do the wrong thing here. Embedded spaces annoy, > but that's what -print0 (to find) and -0 (to xargs) are for. I almost > always use xargs here, to the extent I have to look up how to do a > 'find -exec' most times that I want to use it.
I guess I'm used to older behavior I've seen on other non-OpenBSD systems. Thanks for the corrections from everyone. Like someone has previously stated, you learn something new from some of these threads that were previously thought useless. > > That and well, explaining xargs to Dave > > will end up leading to another 20+ mail thread.... > > I think an actual utility that doesn't need programming skills to > experiment with it might be easier than explaining Berkeley Packet > Filter vs. Packet Filter. I know most of us know what BPF is, > but googling around from a beginner's point of view I'm still not > quite sure how I learnt about it. There's a paper at > http://www.tcpdump.org/papers/bpf-usenix93.pdf (section 2, 'the > network tap', for example) but I know I haven't read that before. > > Learning xargs and find (not to mention regular expressions, > shell syntax - for/while/..., and so on) are probably more useful > to general sysadmin tasks than learning what BPF is, though.. > (even learning how to use tcpdump is probably more generally > useful than learning about BPF - and let's pre-empt one possible > path down that avenue: root being able to see certain passwords > with 'tcpdump -s1500 -X' is not a security hole, it's just a > demonstration of why some protocols should be buried). He couldn't even figure out how to find the applications that use bpf, so I think figuring out all the features in a utility might be out of his grasp... Jason
