Re: [9fans] du and find

[roger peppe <rogpeppe@gmail.com>]

2009/12/29 erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>:
> what seems more important to me is a way to unlimit the size
> of argv.  otherwise we'll need to go down the hideous xargs path.
> (apoligizes to hideous functions everywhere for the slur.)

i don't really see why xargs (the idea, not the usual unix implementations)
is inherently such a bad idea. years ago i wrote an ultra simple version
with no options, and it's about 80 lines of code, which i use to grep
through all of /sys/src for example.

if you always split on \n (which is banned in filenames in plan 9) and
don't interpret any other metacharacters, what's the problem?

it's also nice because you often get some results before you've
walked the entire file tree.