On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Andrew Brown wrote:

# >That's a performance lose, but xargs is still more portable than a new
# >program.
# 
# a xargs that does this or the cp/mv that does that...either way it's
# not portable.

No, the "xargs that does this" is every proprietary UNIX version's
xargs, directly descended from SysV xargs.  Our xargs is crippled.
If we were to make our xargs fully functional, it would be portable,
though, as someone pointed out, in the case of doing a mv as it was
described, it's a lose because you end up with an exec() for each
argument.

Now, if you were to do

find foo -name \*somepat\* -type f | xargs mv '{}' otherthere

you'd get it in one swell foop.

...if our xargs were up to spec, that is...

				--*greywolf;
--
BSD: daemonic power.