"Dan Heller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > While [using xargs] technically "works" in that comands don't "fail", per se, > it doesn't solve the real problem at hand; the command is reading all the > info coming in (du, in this case), and tallying up info "on the fly". If > it then has to terminate and be restarted again (by xargs), it isn't aware > of it. To du, it's just running anew. To the user, it's supposed to be > one task. Some commands that are basically stateless (e.g, mv, cp, etc), > can survive with xargs exactly as you point out. ...
> Anyway, the other method is to support the "take the input from a file" > approach that Dave pointed out: Thanks for bringing this up. It would be useful to give du and wc options to make them read all file name arguments from a file. Of course, if such a file were specified as `-', then it would read from stdin. However, before someone goes off to implement this, here are a few things to consider. If the format is simply one file name per line, then what about files with names containing a newline? One solution is to require that newlines and backslashes be backslash-escaped. Another is simply to require that file names be NUL (aka '\0') separated, like what find's -print0 option would output. In the interests of keeping things simple, I'm leaning toward the latter. _______________________________________________ Bug-fileutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-fileutils
