SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> Using a procedure whose output is fed to xargs has an advantage that >> a platform with very short command line limit can still work with >> many source files, but the way you create and use COCCI_SOURCES in >> this patch would defeat that advantage anyway, > > COCCI_SOURCES is only used as an input to 'xargs', so that advantage > is not defeated. It is passed as a command line argument to "echo", that pipes to xargs; I would not say it is taking advantage of "xargs" to lift the command line length limit, as it first needs to convince the shell to feed all of them to the "echo" that is upstream of "xargs". As you mentioned elsewhere, LIB_H already uses the same approach as I outlined in the message you are responding to (i.e. "don't define a procedure to produce lines to the standard output in a $(MAKE) variable--instead make the variable to hold the list itself"), so I suspect that we are almost on the same page?