This is the mail archive of the cygwin mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Xargs positioning the arguments in a command -- is this a bug or a feature?


CygWin 1.5.18

I was trying to create a date-time-sortable list of
files with an appended tag for each entry (ham or
spam flag if you care about the detail) and had some
difficulty with xargs:

dir -gGtcr --time-style=+%Y%m%d%X | cut -c 24- | xargs -i -n 2 echo {}
MORE_STUFF

...doesn't work -- i.e., "{}" appears in the output.

However, reversing the switches does work as expected:

dir -gGtcr --time-style=+%Y%m%d%X | cut -c 24- | xargs -n 2 -i echo {}
MORE_STUFF

I am curious if this is expected behavior as I didn't
see any warning in the xarg --help or man/info entries.

It is an unusual command that requires switches to 
appear in a specific order, especially when the 
switches are not directly dependent on each other.

--
Herb Martin


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]