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From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Look!  An xargs!! (Re: recursive grep)
Message-ID: <1086@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 11 Sep 89 10:53:52 GMT
References: <666@lakart.UUCP> <1641@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <7774@cbmvax.UUCP> <16816@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <1126@virtech.UUCP> <2404@wyse.wyse.com> <10967@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2415@wyse.wyse.com> <10978@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2205@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 27

In article <2205@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) writes:
|In article <10978@smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn@smoke (Doug Gywn) writes:
|
|>Why not simply write a genuine xargs implementation, say in C where you
|>can do it right without a lot of hassle.
|
|Hear! hear!
|
|Who really cares if you can *ALMOST* do it in 35 lines when you can do
|it *RIGHT* in 70?
|
|Forgive this posting of the sources in this newsgroup, but maybe it will
|reduce the noise level. Here is the version of xargs.c from comp.sources.whatever

    [next wrong xargs implementation deleted]

This program doesn't handle spaces in arguments correctly. Moreover,
since the system() function is used to fire up the command, an
(incorrect) re-interpretation of the arguments is done (think of
metacharacters like ',\,",$,` etc). This can be dealt with much better
by using argv[] directly (and execve(), left as an exercise for the
reader).  Another bad feature is the use of gets(); I'd like to feed a
> BUFSIZ line to your xarrrrrgs. Lastly, your xargs does a poor
performance job:  the system imposed limit on argument lists is
typically much higher than BUFSIZ.

   Leo.