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Date:      Fri, 20 Apr 2001 22:39:43 -0400
From:      Brian Dean <bsd@bsdhome.com>
To:        "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net>
Cc:        Jens Schweikhardt <schweikh@schweikhardt.net>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cp -d dir patch for review (or 'xargs'?)
Message-ID:  <20010420223943.A59039@vger.bsdhome.com>
In-Reply-To: <200104210226.TAA68957@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net>; from freebsd@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net on Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 07:26:18PM -0700
References:  <20010420235419.B1276@schweikhardt.net> <200104210226.TAA68957@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net>

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On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 07:26:18PM -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:

> > (cat bigfilelist; echo destdir) | xargs cp
> 
> I like this version of the patch!!  It's much much cleaner than
> hacking up cp or xargs, it even follows the unix principle of
> using simple tools and glueing them togeather to do bigger
> jobs, is unix implementation independent, and is very clear
> in what it does.

It's clean, simple, and unfortunately, totally bogus.

Try:

  echo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | xargs -n 4 echo

Now consider what would happen with the above suggested construct with
a very long file list.

I don't see a problem with adding an option to cp to treat the first
argument as the target instead of the last argument.  It's a simple
solution, the code change is simple, and it produces the exact desired
result.  What's the problem?

-Brian

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