Oops. And a brainteaser. Re: The Hosstraders retire

[Steven W. Orr]

On Tuesday, Feb 20th 2007 at 11:16 -0500, quoth Drew Van Zandt:

=>> The number of arguments that you can pass to a program (for example,
=>> grep) is finite.  Also know that getconf(ARG_MAX) is a byte-count and
=>> not an argument count.
=>
=>A situation for which xargs may sometimes be useful, it depends on
=>what you're trying to do.
=>
=>--DTVZ

This just drags me down Memory Lane. Way back in the Olden Days, I was 
running Open Desktop 1.0. When I started X, it caused a bunch of stuff to 
be added to the environment, s.t., env | wc -c went over about 5K if 
memory serves. The value of ARG_MAX was 8K so writing big commandlines was 
out of the question. I also remember that Solaris had an ARG_MAX of around 
a gig which made me very jealous. Learning to use xargs was mandatory for 
survival.

-- 
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have  .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
steveo at syslang.net