On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 04:26:41PM +0100, Paul Jakma wrote:
> why not:
>> find . \(-name '*.scf' -o name '*.ab1'\) -a -exec cp {} <final dir>\;
You don't need the brackets here, since order of operation is not important.
> ?
>> I'm sure xargs is great and all that, but what's the point of it
> exactly when ye good olde POSIX find has -exec? ;)
Because there is a limit to the number of commands that can be specified to
applications (20k), but if there are a lot of file names -exec will break,
since it puts all of the files at once at the end of the cp command. xargs
breaks this limit into manageable chunks so that the result is accurate.
-- Thomas Adam
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