Re: xargs: exec's with too many arguments

[James Youngman]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 02:54:36PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
> address@hidden (James Youngman) wrote:
> ...
> > Many systems now include the 'buffer' program (I have it here on an
> > Ubuntu box).  If you have it, try piping the data through 'buffer -z
> > 4096' (or whatever PIPE_BUF is on your machine if it's not 4096).
> 
> Hi James,
> 
> Funny seeing a message from you, then minutes later seeing the symptom
> of a bug in xargs.  I was running xargs to grep through the files in an
> mh-style folder and got an `Argument list too long' error.
> 
> Here's a stand-alone example to demonstrate the problem:
[...]
> With the patch included below, it works:
[...]

Ouch, this is a serious bug in functionality thta should be completely
reliable.  I will try to get a fixed 4.2.x release out promptly.  I
just need to make sure NEWS and ChangeLog are updated for all the
other changes and change the example you gave into a test case for the
findutils regression tests.

Thanks for discovering and fixing the bug.

Regards,
James.