Oops. And a brainteaser. Re: The Hosstraders retire

[aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net]

> From: kclark at elbrysnetworks.com (Kevin D. Clark)
> Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:46:01 -0500

> Another thing that you might want to consider is that the grep command
> that you present could die in a mysterious way -- you might have too
> much mail in a given folder, and thus you might have too many
> arguments to fit on the command line:
> 
> 
> 
>           $ getconf ARG_MAX
>           131072
>           $ /bin/echo `perl -e 'print "a " while ($_++ < 131072)'`
>           -bash: /bin/echo: Argument list too long

Then,

> Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:16:41 -0500
> From: "Drew Van Zandt" <drew.vanzandt at gmail.com>

> > 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.

xargs, specified with both -s and -n, should never fail this way:

       $ find $spec -print0 | xargs --null -s $s -n $n $command

for appropriate values of $s and $n.