ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson) (07/11/88)
Familiar scene: you want to grep for something in a large number of files. You generate the list of file names, then grep whatever `cat listofnames` only to get an arg list too long message. "Sure wish I could tell grep to read the names of the files to handle from a file" you think at first. Then you recall a couple of recent postings about how such options aren't needed, since you can use xargs to get the job done, a la cat listofnames | xargs grep whatever /dev/null (This does the wrong thing if there's only one filename; since we're assuming a large number of files. . .) Sure enough, everything works fine. Now suppose, though, that the command is grep -s whatever `cat listofnames` If so, doing a cat listofnames | xargs grep -s whatever /dev/null doesn't get the job done right. . .at least not with the System V Release 2 version on xargs that lurks on the systems around here. And so the question: do more recent versions of xargs allow better control of the exit status returned by xargs? -- ado@ncifcrf.gov ADO is a trademark of Ampex.