On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 6:24 AM, <frede...@ofb.net> wrote: > I guess if xargs were to trap SIGINT and defer exiting, then it would > end up waiting for its sub-process to die, which should happen soon > anyway because the sub-process also receives SIGINT.
They could have blocked (or handled and ignored) it. Indeed, there is no guaranteeing that any of xargs' children will exit at all. > I wonder if such > behavior would ever be objectionable. Perhaps it is not of great > importance to many people. My reading of http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap01.html#tag_17_04 is that xargs could compliantly signal its children to exit but that it could not compliantly wait indefinitely for them to actually terminate, since they may not (and if they don't, then xargs is not behaving as expected, since it should itself terminate). Signalling the children is either redundant (since they're part of the same process group) or potentially unexpected. I'm not determined that xargs should _not_ be changed in the way you're suggesting, but an argument in favour of change would need to be compelling enough to overcome the various factors that somewhat weigh against making this change. James.
