Re: ls options: accept stdin, and list files except for...

[Richard Dawe]

Hello.

Dan Heller wrote:
> 
> On Sep 14,  8:15pm, Richard Dawe wrote:
> >     find . ! -type d ! -name '*.html' | xargs ls [OPTIONS]
> >
> > (Find all files that are not directories and not called '*.html'.)
> 
> There is one major issue here, and one mnor one. The major problem is
> that the output for one command may be too long to be used as the
> command for whatever xargs launches.

Um, that's the problem that xargs is designed to avoid. It knows the maximum
allowed command-line length. If the command-line would be too long for
whatever command xargs is running, then it will split it. See the man page for
xargs.

[snip]
> I can't use xargs, backticks, or even a shell script that saves the
> list and launches things separately because of the inherent problem
> that the command can't be executed if the arg list is too long.

You can use xargs.

> IMHO, the simplest solution to this, and the most elegant, albeit not
> one that would win an obfuscated coding contest, is to simply enhance
> command-line utils to read the list of filename arguments on stdin.
[snip]

There's no need. You can use xargs.

Believe me, I've used xargs with a command-line consisting of over 7000
absolute paths and it worked fine.

Regards,

-- 
Richard Dawe [ http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/ ]