Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Pipes?

[Jan Hudec]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 08:04:16 +1100, Brian May wrote:
> >>>>> "Pierce" == Pierce T Wetter <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>     Pierce>   I can easily think of cases where someone would want to
>     Pierce> pass more arguments to tla then can fig in a command
>     Pierce> line...
> 
> xargs copes with this situation, by default it will repeatedly call
> the command with the maximum number of arguments each time, until it
> runs out of arguments.

That works for tools where passing many arguments is equivalent to
calling it for each separately. But that is not the case of tar. Tar
needs to get them in a SINGLE invocation no matter how many they are. 
So tar really needs to be able to read the list from a file, while eg.
rm does not need it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
<address@hidden>

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