Re: [COREUTILS] dirname line commands

[Eric Blake]

> dirname: too many arguments
> Try `dirname --help' for more information.
> 
> 
> instead i had to get jiggy and issue
> 
> for i in `locate asterisk` ; do dirname $i ; done | sort | uniq
> 
> why doesn't dirname eat the stdin from xargs ( i tried a bunch or xargs 
> switches -d and -e to no avail.)

Because dirname is documented as taking exactly one argument,
thanks to POSIX.  Try xargs -L 1 to force one filename per dirname
invocation (although that does turn into as many processes as your
for loop).  Or consider using a sed script instead, to reduce the
process load of computing multiple dirnames over a list.

-- 
Eric Blake