4 ms·

I'd give half marks for this, because it optimizes (meaninglessly) for processes, at the risk of ending up with "rm: Too many arguments" in a directory tree con

• falsedan 13y ago
  zero marks for not understanding how xargs works
  • aaronem 13y ago
    And a resounding "no hire" for privileging snark over substance.
    • falsedan 13y ago
      wouldn't take an offer from a place where sysadmins wouldn't read a man page to verify a candidate's answer
• tene 13y ago
  xargs knows the maximum command line length, and will invoke the program more than once if necessary. One of the points of xargs is to break up invocations of a program into chunks of arguments that fit in one maximum length command line. xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial- arguments followed by items read from standard input. --max-chars=max-chars -s max-chars Use at most max-chars characters per command line, including the command and initial-arguments and the terminating nulls at the ends of the argument strings. The largest allowed value is sys‐ tem-dependent, and is calculated as the argument length limit for exec, less the size of your environment, less 2048 bytes of headroom. If this value is more than 128KiB, 128Kib is used as the default value; otherwise, the default value is the maximum. 1KiB is 1024 bytes.
  • falsedan 13y ago
    Well put
  • aaronem 13y ago
    Well, how about that! It could be that I formed my opinion regarding xargs before it got that smart, or it could be the old Red Hat boxes on which I mostly learned my craft didn't bother compiling in that capability. Either way, I'm glad to know about it now, and thank you very kindly for pointing it out to me!
    • falsedan 13y ago
      breaking up the input into multiple executions is feature #1 for xargs and has been present since PWB UNIX in 1977
      • aaronem 13y ago
        Then perhaps I'm thinking of "rm -f `find ...`". In any case, thanks for pointing it out; I learned something new today.
• tene 13y ago
  xargs knows the maximum command line length, and will invoke the program more than once if necessary. One of the points of xargs is to break up invocations of a program into chunks of arguments that fit in one maximum length command line. xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial- arguments followed by items read from standard input. --max-chars=max-chars -s max-chars Use at most max-chars characters per command line, including the command and initial-arguments and the terminating nulls at the ends of the argument strings. The largest allowed value is sys‐ tem-dependent, and is calculated as the argument length limit for exec, less the size of your environment, less 2048 bytes of headroom. If this value is more than 128KiB, 128Kib is used as the default value; otherwise, the default value is the maximum. 1KiB is 1024 bytes.