Subject: Re: bug#60506: feature: parallel grep --recursive

From: "Paul Jackson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:32:01 -0600

David Pickett wrote:
<< I also wrote a simpler, line oriented, faster xargs, fxargs!  >>

I've been quite pleased with an xargs wrapper I wrote that basically
converts newlines to nuls, and then invokes either "xargs" or, if asked
to run multiple threads, "parallel --xargs", passing all the "xargs" arguments
to "xargs --null".

I got all the exit status's and such just right, and preferred having all the
xargs options available, once this hack worked around the confused
space character handling of xargs without the --null option.

I call my wrapper "x", a short name since  I use it a lot, having been a regular
xargs user since it was added to Version 7 Unix, inside Bell Labs, back around
1978.

You can find my wrapper at:

http://thepythoniccow.us/x.c

By the way, even the original author of xargs, Herb Gellis, agrees that its
interface is somewhat borked.  See a note Gellis posted a decade after writing
xargs, which I include in the above "x.c" source.  An amusing bit of history ...

-- 
                Paul Jackson
                [email-masked]