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Date:      Sat, 21 Apr 2001 16:33:29 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de>
To:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cp -d dir patch for review (or 'xargs'?)
Message-ID:  <200104211433.QAA04049@lurza.secnetix.de>
In-Reply-To: <20010421131857.B4574@schweikhardt.net>

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Jens Schweikhardt <schweikh@schweikhardt.net> wrote:
 > You mean if bigfilelist list exceeds the -n limit of xargs (default 5000)?
 > Yes, you'll be surprised then. It was a bit of POLA violation for me when I
 > found xargs would by default use 5000 arg chunks and not all in one go.
 > I'd rather get rid of kern.argmax and the limitations of the exec familiy.
 > Yes, I'm dreaming :-)

Certainly, it would cause a whole lot of other problems,
the smallest of which would be that people would be
starting to write non-portable scripts that rely on the
feature that there is no ARG_MAX limit.

By the way, the -i and -I options of xargs are specified
in the SUSv2 standard, and I think it would certainly be
a good thing to comply with that.  At least it would be
a whole lot better than hacking a non-standard option into
cp which would solve the problem for one particular case
only, while fixing xargs would solve the whole class of
problems.

Putting that option into cp seems rather GNUish to me, but
not very UNIXish.  :-)

Just my 2 Euro cents.

Regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

"All that we see or seem is just a dream within a dream" (E. A. Poe)

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