bin/57253: xargs wraps lines after ~4k characters

[marc%fege.net@localhost]

>Number:         57253
>Category:       bin
>Synopsis:       xargs wraps lines after ~4k characters
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    bin-bug-people
>State:          open
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Thu Mar 02 09:05:00 +0000 2023
>Originator:     Marc Fege
>Release:        9.3
>Organization:
>Environment:
NetBSD rpi.marc.fege.local 9.3 NetBSD 9.3 (RPI) #0: Thu Aug  4 15:30:37 UTC 2022  mkrepro%mkrepro.NetBSD.org@localhost:/usr/src/sys/arch/evbarm/compile/RPI evbarm
>Description:
Hello everyone,

I have some very long output lines in various shell scripts needed to be processed by xargs.
After a certain length of input the 'xargs' command wraps lines automatically after ARG_MAX, as it is described by the man page in paragraph "-s". This to remove the newlines characters one need to remove them with a 'tr -d "\n"' just in case xargs ever produce ones. However, a common user as me might not expect this behaviour/limitation occuring in the 21st century any more and uses xargs to line up all input data to a giant one line argument to be processed. As long as there is addressable memory available, no command should forcefully ever wrap after a certain amount of line length or stop working on an artificially limit set, even if this limit had a reason in former times. I am not a software develloper at all. So I just could give a more ore less educated guess.

Good success on your projects
Marc Fege.
>How-To-Repeat:
Gather a very long line beyond ARG_MAX and pipe it through 'xargs'. Output will have additional \n in it.
>Fix:
Replace ARG_MAX limitations with malloc().