On Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:49:39 EST erik quanstrom <quans...@quanstro.net> wrote: > > And can eat up a lot of memory or even run out of it. On a > > 2+ year old MacBookPro "find -x /" takes 4.5 minutes for 1.6M > > files and 155MB to hold paths. My 11 old machine has 64MB > > and over a million files on a rather slow disk. Your solution > > would run out of space on it. > > modern cat wouldn't fit in core on the early pdps unix was > developed on!
No point in gratuitously obsoleting old machines. I am running FreeBSD-7.2 on it my 11yo machine and so far it has stood up well enough. > just to be fair, could you fit your 1.6m files on your 11yu machine? > i'm guessing you couldn't. Yes. It's on its third disk. A 6yo 80G IDE disk. > > Basically this is just streams programming for arguments > > instead of data. > > that's fine. but it's no excuse to hobble exec. not unless > you're prepared to be replace argument lists with an argument > fd. Not sure how exec is hobbled. Given the way Unix programs behave you can't replace arg list with an arg fd (I used to carry around a libary to do just that but the problem is all the standard programs). Anyway, I don't see how xargs can be gotten rid of.
