On Mon, 14 Feb 2022, Mike Frysinger wrote:
On 14 Feb 2022 19:53, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 2/14/22 19:45, Mike Frysinger wrote:
how portable is xargs ?
It can be a porting problem, unfortunately. There are several corner
cases that various implementations don't get right. I expect this is why
the GNU Coding Standards exclude xargs from the list of programs that
'configure' and Makefile rules can use.
are the corner cases known ? if it's such that xargs doesn't always correctly
limit itself to the system limit based on other factors, i can live with that
assuming that the -n option is reliable.
This morning I read this discussion thread and did not see any actual
problems with current (on systems that people are still using) xargs
portability mentioned.
Microsoft Windows (e.g. POSIX environments which run under Windows
such as Cygwin, MSYS, etc.) is surely an existing corner case which
demands more attention than archaic systems. It seems that the
command line length when using Microsoft Windows may depend on the
number of bytes in the arguments (not the number of arguments) as well
as the number of bytes in the current environment variable data.
A problem with xargs is that without using the GNU -O or --null
argument and null-terminated arguments, file names containing spaces
won't be handled properly. File names containing spaces is an issue
for Autotools in general. This is again an issue under Microsoft
Windows where users typically are provided with directory paths which
contain a space and they need to take additional administrative
measures in order to provide directory paths which work with
Autotools.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt
