Beware xargs security holes

[L. Mark Larsen]

In article <63404 at iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>, sahayman at iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) writes:
# >Yeah. xargs should have a -0 option for taking null-separated filenames
# >for its input. find should have a -print0 option for producing similar
# >output.
# 
# So long as you have to modify "find" anyway to solve this problem, why
# not just add "-xargs" option to "find", that would be like the "-exec"
# option only using as many file names as possible at once.
# 
# 	find .... -xargs rm {} \;
# 
# Seems simpler than modifying two programs.
# 

Actually, this is what was done when find was rewritten for SVR4 (among
other things).  The way to use it is to terminate the command with "+"
instead of ";" (e.g., find ... -exec rm {} +)

I never much cared for xargs since it limits you to an argument list of
only 470 bytes.  Since all of the System V UNIX's I know of support argument
lists of at least 5120 bytes (12288 in UTS), this has always seemed like
too small of an upper-limit to me - though it's still better than one exec
per file...

L. Mark Larsen
lml at atlas.att.com