bug#13472: [PATCH 0/1] Execution mode can hang pc when parameter refers to big file

[Pavel Raiskup]

Hi, sorry for the delay, here comes my (quite simple) proposal,

>> Autoconf/libtool in general does not seem to support the notion of
>> supporting both a cross-compiler for the target and a native compiler for
>> producing programs supporting the build, or remote/emulated testing of
>> the "target".  If this hurdle was solved in a clean way, then many
>> implementation opportunities would appear.
>
> Agreed.
>
> The conclusion is that there is no existing infrastructure for building
> helper executables in libtool.

this idea is not included, sadly - I'm unable to provide enough error
prone solution and design such architecture.

> BTW, here's an alternative to "dd if="$1" bs=16K count=1"
>
>    od -bvN 16K "$1" |
>    sed 's/^[^ ]*//;/^ *$/d;s/  */\\\\/g' |
>    while read l; do printf $l; done
>
> Sadly "od -bvN" isn't portable, an alternative seems to be "hexdump -bvn".

Thanks for this suggestion!

I was thinking about it and it looks that the 'dd' utility should be
enough portable for POSIX systems as it will be used with basic arguments.
And if the 'dd' is not found, no so big issue happens;  libtool has the
same behaviour as before — read the whole file.

Anyway, use of 'hexdump' or 'od' (which is at least on linux usually part
of coreutils (same as dd)) may easily be incorporated when necessary which
will cost just another one bash if-branch.

[PATCH] libtool: speed up by pre-cutting sed's input by dd

Pavel