Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: File naming conventions

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 10:26, Miles Bader wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 05:01:39PM -0700, Dustin Sallings wrote:
> >     desktop:~/prog/p4gw/cms 3011> ctags `tla inventory -s`
> >     /usr/local/bin/ctags: Argument list too long.
> > 
> >     I suppose since this version of ctags has an option to avoid 
> > clobbering the tags file on a second invocation, I can use 
> > xargs...unless there's whitespace or something in a filename somewhere.
> 
> Slightly off-topic, but xargs doesn't have any problem with typical
> whitespace in file names; the main issue is _newlines_ in filenames.

Not quite the point.

xargs doesn't, but when space-containing filenames are passed by
xargs to just about any other Unix tool, that tool interprets the
spaces to mean filename endings. Thus the point of persuading
find and xargs to use \0 as argument/filename endings.

If you try it (or have been bitten by it, like me) you will
discover that find and xargs don't work as expected (in most
scenarios) without the -print0 and -0 options...