Re: /bin/cat : argument list is too long

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hello!

On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 06:06:29AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote:
> According to Manickam Muthuraman on 11/21/2007 4:47 AM:
> > address@hidden:~/HHpred/scop_hmm> cat *.hhm > scop70_1.72.hhm

> { echo *.hhm | xargs cat; } > scop70_1.72.hhm.tmp

I was looking at these two command lines and wondered why you think that
``cat *.hhm'' would produce a longer command line than ``echo *.hhm''
does.

But I think I just found the answer why this might indeed work: `echo'
usually (?) is a shell built-in function and thus doesn't have this
limitation (?).  Correct?

Otherwise, wouldn't some construct like the following one be even better?
(Save the discussion about the portability of using the null chararcter
separator, of course.)

    find ./ -name \*.hhm -print0 | sort -z | xargs -0 cat > ...


Regards,
 Thomas

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