Patrick Steinhardt <ps@xxxxxx> writes: >> As xargs is supposed to know the system limit, perhaps >> >> test_seq 0 9999 | xargs printf "...%d...\n" >> >> should work? > > Is there a reason why we want to avoid using awk(1) in the first place? > We use it in several other tests and I don't think that the resulting > code is all that bad. There is no reason. It was a canned reaction against "gee we will bust shell's limit" to "use xargs then". Of course, if we can do the loop in the shell and everything we do in the loop with shell builtins (printf is often builtin in modern shells but not always, if I recall correctly), that would be best, and if the job is _that_ simple that we could do in the shell, it would make "awk" a horrible choice ;-)
