Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 21 Apr 2001 23:45:09 +0100
From:      Brian Somers <brian@Awfulhak.org>
To:        Dima Dorfman <dima@unixfreak.org>
Cc:        Brian Somers <brian@Awfulhak.org>, Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, olli@secnetix.de, brian@Awfulhak.org
Subject:   Re: cp -d dir patch for review (or 'xargs'?) 
Message-ID:  <200104212245.f3LMj9550349@hak.lan.Awfulhak.org>
In-Reply-To: Message from Dima Dorfman <dima@unixfreak.org>  of "Sat, 21 Apr 2001 15:11:04 PDT." <20010421221104.65A033E09@bazooka.unixfreak.org> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Brian Somers <brian@Awfulhak.org> writes:
> > I looked at your patches and immediately thought ``these patches 
> > can't be right'' as I was expecting it to deal with things such as 
> > 
> >   xargs -I [] echo args are [], duplicated are []
> 
> It deals with it.  It conveniently ignores the second '[]' :-).
> Seriosly though, what do you expect it to do in this case?  It can
> either read some more from stdin, or use the same input it used for
> the first case of '[]'.  I also can't think of a case when either one
> of these would be useful.

I can't think of a case either :*]

> I guess the only reason we would want this is if SUSv2 defines it, but
> even that may not matter since we probably won't support the silly
> '-i[nospace]' semantic (other than being silly, I can't think of how
> to implement it without writing a custom getopt() facility).

Absolutely - we wanna avoid that sort of mucking about.

> > I'm also dubious about the patches working for large volumes on 
> > standard input.  At this point I scrapped the email I was composing 
> > 'cos I didn't have time to look into it further :-/
> > 
> > I think it's important to test any patches with a large number of 
> > large path names as input - so that ARG_MAX is reached before the 
> > 5000 argument limit and we can see that we don't end up getting E2BIG 
> > because of an accidental overflow/miscalculation.
> 
> Any advice on testing this (you did write rev. 1.9 of xargs.1, after
> all)?  I created a file with 4500 words like this:
> 
> 	/this/is/a/very/long/path/name/because/I/am/testing/some/posix/limit/10
> 
> which ended up being 330 kB.  It ran the `utility' multiple times like
> I expected it to.  That said, I don't know what kind of failure mode
> to expect.  I.e., if the patch is wrong, should it have failed with
> something like, "xargs: exec: argument list too long", or would it
> just produce incorrect output (which I didn't really check for)?

Yes, I was expecting it to fail with E2BIG.  Sorry for doubting your 
patches - they work as advertised from the looks of it !  Nice one.

> Thanks,

Thank you !

> 					Dima Dorfman
> 					dima@unixfreak.org

-- 
Brian <brian@Awfulhak.org>                        <brian@[uk.]FreeBSD.org>
      <http://www.Awfulhak.org>;                   <brian@[uk.]OpenBSD.org>
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour !



To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200104212245.f3LMj9550349>