Command Line Life Partner Wanted

emj writes "Craiglist offers an interesting approach to finding a life partner , summmary: "There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." ... Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix."."

Comments

Good luck raising that autistic kid

[metamatic]

I figure two command line devotees will result in at least a case of the ass burgers.

Re:hmmm...

[TheRaven64]

Depends on the operating system. With some UNIX flavours (HURD being the notable exception) there is a hard limit to the length of parameters you can pass to a process. This is imposed by the kernel, not the shell. In your example, xargs would hit this limit. The solution is to use a sane command line where wildcard expansion is in a standard library, not in the shell (as it would have been with UNIX if UNIX had supported shared libraries), so that the expansion can be done in the grep process where these memory constraints don't exist (or, better, accessed via an iterator in grep so that these constraints don't appear at all).

UNIX: Because getting even something as simple as a command-line right is too hard.