On 2006/02/13 17:28, Jason Crawford wrote: > Well in the case of /usr/src, I think you must MIGHT hit the maximum > argument length for the shell by using xargs
I haven't seen xargs do the wrong thing here. Embedded spaces annoy, but that's what -print0 (to find) and -0 (to xargs) are for. I almost always use xargs here, to the extent I have to look up how to do a 'find -exec' most times that I want to use it. > That and well, explaining xargs to Dave > will end up leading to another 20+ mail thread.... I think an actual utility that doesn't need programming skills to experiment with it might be easier than explaining Berkeley Packet Filter vs. Packet Filter. I know most of us know what BPF is, but googling around from a beginner's point of view I'm still not quite sure how I learnt about it. There's a paper at http://www.tcpdump.org/papers/bpf-usenix93.pdf (section 2, 'the network tap', for example) but I know I haven't read that before. Learning xargs and find (not to mention regular expressions, shell syntax - for/while/..., and so on) are probably more useful to general sysadmin tasks than learning what BPF is, though.. (even learning how to use tcpdump is probably more generally useful than learning about BPF - and let's pre-empt one possible path down that avenue: root being able to see certain passwords with 'tcpdump -s1500 -X' is not a security hole, it's just a demonstration of why some protocols should be buried).
