From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: Plan 9 annoyances (was: Re: [9fans] mv vs cp)
From: rog@vitanuova.com
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Date: Tue,  9 Oct 2001 11:55:04 +0100
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> > i've missed find several times. xargs always struck me as
> > compensating for poor shell design.
>
> Isn't the problem the argv limits of number of characters and number of
> words?

i don't think so entirely...

for instance if i want to grep through an entire source tree,
i don't want to wait until the tree has been traversed completely
before the text searching begins. using

	du -a . | awk '{print $2}' | xargs grep pattern

often gives me results much faster than

	grep pattern `{du -a . | awk '{print $2}'}

the latter usually works. i don't know what the kernel
limit is on command-line arguments, but it's more than sufficient
to pass all the source files in /sys/src (6764 files, ~160K).

  rog.