> > Obviously by my response I don't think something like that is needed. > Is there a reason that you can't use one of the several existing > methods? Can you provide some examples where not having this feature > is significantly problematic? >
Sure.. 1: suppose I want to build a 'project' file, which contains a list of files that I care about - one that avoids temporary files, binary files, etc. This would then be a very nice feature. 2. suppose - in this file, I want to pass commands to grep (in the form of config flags, or something more fancy. Then this is a very nice feature. 3. even with the find solution you are opening up multiple grep processes per file which costs time. This feature avoids that overhead. In any case, the 'arg list too long' problem being solved in new versions of linux doesn't help me because it isn't cross platform. Ultimately, I have something like this in mind in the filelist I wish to pass to grep: -n --expand-gzip --expand-tar /file1 /file2 /file3.tar.gz or more fancy: -n <helper_command>: /file1 <helper_command>: /file2 where helper command is a command that is run on the file contents of /file1 before being passed to grep.. Anyways, that's ok, I've implemented a bit hacky way of doing this, so if it's unacceptable to have this in the core, I have a workaround. Thanks, Ed
