Thanks for the suggestion and patch.
I suspect that command line length limitations have prompted
you to suggest this change. If so, it would be more in the Unix
spirit to use xargs to solve your problem.
Let's say you have a list of files in F and you want to run md5sum on
each of those. If the list is long enough, then you can't simply run
md5sum `cat F`
because the expansion of `cat F` would make your command line longer
than the maximum. The `xargs' program was designed to handle just this
sort of situation. You can do this instead
xargs md5sum < F
and xargs will run md5sum on batches of many files from F until it has
run it on all of them.
If you have some other motivation, please let me know.
Ken Dawson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
| In keeping track of content changes on large numbers of files, I have
| found that giving md5sum the ability to take the list of file names to be
| processed from a file rather than from the command line argument list is
| quite helpful. I include the mods I made to the 2.0 version of the
| source to implement this feature.
...
