Dima Dorfman wrote:
> Garance A Drosihn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > Or maybe something to indicate where the list of arguments
> > should go in a command. Hrm. Let's say '-Y replstr' or
> > '-y[replstr]' (no blank after -y). If no [replstr] is
> > given on -y, it defaults to the two characters '[]'.
> > Then one might do:
> > cat big_file_list | xargs -y cp [] target_directory
>
> This is a great idea! I'm willing to implement it if nobody else
> wants to.
>
> > you're trying to address. On the other hand, the man page
> > for 'xargs' on FreeBSD says:
> >
> > The xargs utility is expected to be IEEE Std 1003.2
> > (``POSIX.2'') compliant.
> >
> > so I don't know how we go about adding options to it. On
> > the other hand, that same issue is faced by adding options
> > to 'cp', as there is a similar claim made in cp's man page.
>
> I don't think it's a problem. We're adding new options here, not
> changing--sometimes known as breaking--what already exists. I'm
> pretty sure that the standards don't say anything to the effect of,
> "You must support this and nothing else." That'd be rather silly.
I don't think that introducing a new option in the tool that expected
to be compatible among several systems is a good thing. Once new option
is introduced and documented, people would start using it, in many
cases even without a notion that this option is FreeBSD specific, which
will obviously lead to users' confusion and scripts incompatabilities.
The right way to go, IMO, is to introduce a simple wrapper for xargs
(say yargs), that it will be clearly documented as a FreeBSD scecific
thing.
-Maxim
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