Re: How to deal with space in command line?

[Greg Wooledge]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 02:56:50PM +0200, Sven Mascheck wrote:
> > If there is an absolute requirement to put *all* the files on a single
> > command, "-exec +" may fail to satisfy it.  It might break up the files
> > into groups.
> 
> Yes, but the same limit (ARG_MAX) gets hit, as soon as you call an external
> command, like "vi "${array[@]}" in the example above.

"-exec +" may break things into groups that are smaller than ARG_MAX.
There's no guarantee how big the groups are.  Also, if you truly must
have them all in one invocation, it may be better to fail and get a
nice friendly error, than to have the command run with only a subset of
the files.

This is where obfuscation of examples (e.g. replacing whatever-it-is with
'vi' or 'ls') causes issues.