Steve Langasek:
SL> On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 03:17:35PM +0000, River Tarnell wrote:
>> i'm not sure what's causing this, but the use of xargs seems pointless
>> anyway; 'find -exec rm {};' should work without the possibility of
>> producing this error.
SL> No. -exec spawns a separate subprocess for each file, and cannot handle
SL> embedded spaces in filenames; it is to be avoided for non-trivial uses.
-exec has no problem with spaces in filenames:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/ftest>touch 'one two three' 'four five six'
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/ftest>find . -type f -exec ls -l {} \;
-rw-r--r-- 1 river users 0 2008-01-27 07:42 ./one two three
-rw-r--r-- 1 river users 0 2008-01-27 07:42 ./four five six
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/ftest>
it only executes one process per command if you use the ';' form.
'-exec rm {} +' would work the same way as xargs. unfortunately, when
i tested that it also produced the same error :)
i see GNU find has a '-delete' extension, which would seem to be even
better suited to this particular case (assuming this script isn't also
required to work on non-GNU systems).
SL> The only way you could get this error message is if the combined number of
SL> bytes in the environment and argument list exceeded the kernel maximum. Per
SL> the xargs manpage, by default the arguments are batched in groups of 131072
SL> bytes. Do you have an extraordinarily large number of environment
SL> variables? If so, we might be able to fix this bug by using 'env';
SL> otherwise, I can't see any way that this bug would occur with a normal
SL> kernel.
I manually deleted the old sessions (because it was producing the
error every half an hour), so I'm not sure how many files there were.
cron was started by me after sudo'ing, so it has my environment:
PATH=/opt/intel/idb/10.0.023/bin:/opt/intel/cc/10.0.023/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/opt/sun/sunstudio12/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin
MAIL=/var/mail/river
TERM=xterm
LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-15
HOME=/home/river
SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
LOGNAME=root
USER=root
USERNAME=root
SUDO_COMMAND=/usr/bin/zsh
SUDO_USER=river
SUDO_UID=1072
SUDO_GID=100
SHLVL=1
PWD=/home/river/ftest
OLDPWD=/home/river/ftest
CVS_RSH=ssh
EDITOR=vim
NNTPSERVER=news.gmane.org
FTP_PASSIVE=yes
LESS=-egiJMRw -z-3
DMAKE_MAX_JOBS=2
DMAKE_MODE=parallel
MANPATH=/opt/intel/idb/10.0.023/man:/opt/intel/cc/10.0.023/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/local/man
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/intel/cc/10.0.023/lib
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/intel/cc/10.0.023/lib
INTEL_LICENSE_FILE=/opt/intel/cc/10.0.023/licenses:/opt/intel/licenses:/home/river/intel/licenses:/Users/Shared/Library/Application
Support/Intel/Licenses
_=/usr/bin/env
i'll see if i can make xargs do the same thing in a controlled test...
- river.
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