Hello. Dan Heller wrote: [snip] > While it technically "works" in that comands don't "fail", per se, it > doesn't solve the real problem at hand; the command is reading all the > info coming in (du, in this case), and tallying up info "on the fly". If > it then has to terminate and be restarted again (by xargs), it isn't aware > of it. To du, it's just running anew. To the user, it's supposed to be > one task. Some commands that are basically stateless (e.g, mv, cp, etc), > can survive with xargs exactly as you point out. Stateful commands, > (du, dd, tar) do not always have that luxury. [snip]
I don't really understand how a dd command-line is going to get very long. Can you really give it that many options. I guess it's just an example of a stateful command. FWIW tar has an option to take filenames from a file. I'm not sure what you can do about du (as it stands) and making it appear that multiple invocations appear as one. Perhaps you could wrap it in a shell script that munges the output, so it appears as one invocation. > But, it's not an argument against the "stdin" approach either. Not to beat > a dead horse on the point, but the UNIX heritage is all about having small, > light processes that can be strung together by pipes. [snip] > If it weren't for the fact that this is all so easily implemented, I > could see the resistance. But, its implementation is so simple, standard, > and almost-ubiquitous in existing utils, why not just finish the job and > support it for all file-utils? I don't know what resistance you are talking about. Your original bug report and the thing you are talking about now are completely different. You originally complained about long command-lines. Now you are talking about programs where you can't split the command-line. Now you've said what the real problem is, your request to make du, etc. take filenames from stdin makes more sense. Regards, -- Richard Dawe [ http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/ ] _______________________________________________ Bug-fileutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-fileutils
