On Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 09:58:23AM +1100, Russell Davies wrote:
> ; >cd $dir && echo * | xargs -n 400 rm -f
> ;
> ; And just as well, echo * would have run into the same arglist
> ; limitations. ls | xargs rm would be better.
> ;
> quite.. without the performance hit of forking and running rm _for every
> file_ *ouch!*
>
> As an aside, I'd like to comment on the 'find . -print0 | xargs -0 rm'
> line that Andrew posted, this is precisely the sort of GNU specific
> extension that I would recommend that you DON'T learn, the moment you
> move to a Unix platform that doesn't have GNU find (and you will)
The moment you find this to be the case, is the moment you should go out
and compile the GNU toolchain for your platform.
All these portability problems go away once everyone is using the GNU commands.
I mean, why should all these companies employ someone to maintain `ls' (or
similiar) when a better, free version is already available.
> you'll be puzzled. If you do, do so with the knowledge that this is NOT
> supported by traditional find (as found in the 7th Edition Unix Programmer's
> manual).
There are quite a few useful things that `traditional' programs don't do.
I'm not arguing that every program needs to be updated all the time (look
at patch/diff, very few updates) but GNU find is too valuable to not have
on every machine.
Don't leave Linux without it (tm).
Anand
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