On Thursday 27 March 2008 18:51, Brian K. White wrote:
It's also possible for there to be discrepencies between the app being run by xargs, and the rest of the system. Maybe the shell and the kernel will tolerate up to 4k (I think it's more like 100 or 400 but no matter) so xargs generates 4k command lines, but maybe appfoo can only handle 1k ?
That's not how it works.
Sure it is.
No. It's not. There's no way for xargs to know about anything other than the kernel-imposed argument list size limit.
....
Suffice it to say I have seen a larger world.
Prove it.
You have some body of experience, and an assumption that you haven't seen broken. That is fine and a perfectly reasonable and correct basis for continuing to operate from that assumption by default. Doing so is called being efficient and in tune with your environment. But do not mistake that for gospel.
I live by no gospel. And, I dare say, I'm not as arrogant as you.
Consider the implications of this for a while: Why does ./configure run an empirical test, trying progressively larger and larger command lines until it breaks?
Because it can make no assumptions about the configuration of the kernel on which it's running.
-- Brian K. White
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org