Re: xargs - how to get it to execute input args as "the command"?

[James Youngman]

On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Linda A. Walsh <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> James Youngman wrote:
>>
>> You can use the "sh -c" trick to run the first argument as the command.
>>
>
> ----
> Do you think the above case could be optimized?  As I mentioned in my inital
> query, I wanted to avoid shell overhead on 80 thousand sub-jobs.

You have 80,000 lines (=80k commands to run from xargs) or 80,000
command-line srguments?   If the latter, how many commands?

> I.e. is there any reason xargs couldn't run the arguments directly -- i.e.
> taking the first word of input as a program to run and either do a path
> lookup, OR require an absolute path (either would be fine)

I'm reluctant for the usual reasons
1. I think thjs is a niche use case
2. It imposes documentation, testing and maintenance effort out of
proportion (ass far as I can see at the moment, though I am willing to
change my mind) to its usefulness

Plus another reason:
3. The usual execution model of xargs is to run a trusted command on
potentially untrusted arguments.   This widens the exposure somewhat,
because the command being run may also not be trusted.



>> You can use -d to select the delimiter.
>>
>
> ----
> That will work.. didn't see it would override the normal quote
> processing...  Thanks!

If the documentation isn't clear I should fix it.   If you'd like to
suggest a specific change (to both the manual page and the Texinfo
documentation) that would be useful.

> I looked at 'parallel' and 'sem' as well, and they want a command on
> the command line as well... geez...  you'd think something would
> take a list of command in a file and run them in parallel (subject
> to load constraints) w/o having to run a shell w/each command.

batch(1) does this (though you would need to split the input and it
probably uses a shell to launch the command).

>
> Hard to believe such a simple thing wouldn't be an option...but
>
> is there any  reason why putting a "-I {}" by itself on the command
> line shouldn't work?

If you specify zero initial arguments, the default is "echo".

> (tried "exec", but I guess that is a shell builtin...sigh)...

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