more uses for mode 000 (will be: cat -v considered harmful)

[Bernd Felsche]

In <1991Feb12.043341.29652 at athena.mit.edu> scs at adam.mit.edu (Steve Summit) writes:

>This will probably spark a big "cat -v considered harmful"
>flamefest, but I'll opine that adding this tar X option wasn't
>very worthwhile.  The right way to exclude files matching some
>pattern is

>	tar c `find . -print | grep -v pattern`

>Now, Unix is far less restrictive than most operating systems on
>things like command line length limitations, but this is one case
>where you can overload even the generous allotments that the
>shells (and exec) give you.  Therefore, a wrinkle that *is* a
>worthwhile addition to tar is a way to read a list of filenames
>from a file, or from standard input.  I once implemented this as

A permanent fix would be to have a dynamically-sized u_area, or
whatever it's called now. The arg list could then be stored in it, no
matter how large it gets (within address space limitations). This
means that commands don't have to read stdin or files for filenames,
or whatever.

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