> i don't really see why xargs (the idea, not the usual unix implementations) > is inherently such a bad idea. years ago i wrote an ultra simple version > with no options, and it's about 80 lines of code, which i use to grep > through all of /sys/src for example.
that's interesting. my objection to xargs is all about the idea. the usual way of doing things breaks if there are too many files. using xargs does work around the problem. but then why not go all the way and remove ` from rc? after all, ` only works some of the time? > if you always split on \n (which is banned in filenames in plan 9) and > don't interpret any other metacharacters, what's the problem? > > it's also nice because you often get some results before you've > walked the entire file tree. i'm not sure i understand when and why this would be useful. nobody has a real worm anymore. i can walk /sys/src in 0.5s. grepping takes about 12s; saving 1/24th the time (best case) doesn't seem like a big win. (the ratio is 10:1 on coraid's fileserver.) - erik
