An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
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An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
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Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#2This is only tangentially related, but after all the posts here the last few days about thought terminating cliches, I can’t help but reflect on the “X considered harmful” title cliche
Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#3This is only tangentially related, but after all the posts here the last few days about thought terminating cliches, I can’t help but reflect on the “X considered harmful” title cliche
Is it thought terminating, though? "X considered harmful" seems more intended to spark discussion in an intentionally inflammatory way than to stifle it.
(In any case, this surely is tangential, since the title is not "X considered harmful" for any value of X—at best it comments on a post by that title, as, indeed, you are doing.)
Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#4This is only tangentially related, but after all the posts here the last few days about thought terminating cliches, I can’t help but reflect on the “X considered harmful” title cliche
Would you say the title terminated your consideration of the article?
Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#5This is only tangentially related, but after all the posts here the last few days about thought terminating cliches, I can’t help but reflect on the “X considered harmful” title cliche
I've been thinking about titles, and it's hard to make a good one that doesn't look like a total cliché. "X considered harmful", "an opinionated guide to X", some kind of joke or reference, what could be a collection of tags (X, Y and Z), "things I have learned doing X", etc.
Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#6This is only tangentially related, but after all the posts here the last few days about thought terminating cliches, I can’t help but reflect on the “X considered harmful” title cliche
Would you say the title terminated your consideration of the article?
No I think if anything seeing it was a response to “xargs considered harmful” made me take the authors side quicker
Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#7> A lobste.rs user asked why you would use find | xargs rather than find -exec. The answer is that it can be much faster. If you’re trying to rm 10,000 files, you can start one process instead of 10,000 processes!
Fair enough, but I still favor find -exec. I find it generally less error prone, and it's never been so slow that I wished I had instead used xargs.
Also, if you're specifically using -exec rm with find, you could instead use find with -delete.
Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#8> A lobste.rs user asked why you would use find | xargs rather than find -exec. The answer is that it can be much faster. If you’re trying to rm 10,000 files, you can start one process instead of 10,000 processes! Fair enough, but I still favor find -exec . I find it generally less error prone, and it's never been so slow that I wished I had instead used xargs. Also, if you're specifically using -exec rm with find, y…
You can also use `find -exec` with `'+'` instead of `';'` as the terminator. This will call `rm` on all of the found files in one call.
Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#9Wanting verbose logging from xargs, years ago I wrote a script called `el` (edit lines) that basically does `xargs -0` with logging. https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/e...
It turns out that e.g. -print0 and -0 are the only safe way: line endings aren't escaped:
find . -type f -print0 | el -0 --each -x echo
Re: An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
#10This is only tangentially related, but after all the posts here the last few days about thought terminating cliches, I can’t help but reflect on the “X considered harmful” title cliche
Yes, I absolutely hate them. I was thinking of creating a "considered harmful" considered harmful rant but it already exists [0].