Re: [gnu.org #1912852] Typo in the findutils manual

[Bernhard Voelker]

Hello Thérèse,

first of all, I have to admit that I don't have access to RT.
I wrote the sysadmins to clarify.

I hope you'll find this reply on the regular Findutils mailing list.

On 1/23/23 20:02, Therese Godefroy via RT wrote:
> Hello Bernhard,
>
> Here is the sentence the OP is referring to:
>
> "The xargs command will process all its input, building
> command lines and executing them, unless one of the
> commands exits with a status of 255 (this will cause xargs
> to issue an error message and stop) or it reads a line
> contains the end of file string specified with the ‘--eof’
> option."
>
> Even with the typo corrected, I find this sentence a
> little difficult to read. It may help to emphasize its
> structure, for example by adding numbers:
>
> ... unless (1) one of the
> commands exits with a status of 255 (this will cause xargs
> to issue an error message and stop) or (2) it reads a line
> containing the end of file string specified with the ‘--eof’
> option."
>
> Best regards,
> Thérèse
>
>
> Le Lun 23 Jan 2023 04:07:04, bfsct@posteo.de a écrit :
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html
> >
> > s/a line contains the/a line containing the/

I'm not a native speaker, but I find the existing wording quite okay.

What's definitely worth improving is the order of the stop conditions
in that sentence: obviously, xargs would stop when the EOF string from
a given --eof option is read ... before it can check if the launched
command existed with status 255.

  $ seq 252 258 | xargs/xargs -tn1 --eof=255 sh -c 'exit $1' sh
  sh -c 'exit $1' sh 252
  sh -c 'exit $1' sh 253
  sh -c 'exit $1' sh 254

  $ seq 252 258 | xargs/xargs -tn1 --eof=256 sh -c 'exit $1' sh
  sh -c 'exit $1' sh 252
  sh -c 'exit $1' sh 253
  sh -c 'exit $1' sh 254
  sh -c 'exit $1' sh 255
  xargs/xargs: sh: exited with status 255; aborting

What about the attached?

Have a nice day,
Berny

0001-doc-improve-description-bout-when-xargs-stops-proces.patch
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