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Re: xargs: Why does order of command line switches matter?


On 4/25/2012 6:29 AM, Ronald Fischer wrote:
Why do I get a different output in the following two invocations of
xargs? I had expected that the relative order of the command line
switches (-I, -L) would not matter:

$ ls | xargs -I DIR -L 1 echo DIR
DIR wontprint.txt
DIR x.cmd
DIR x.pl
DIR x.sh
$ ls | xargs -L 1 -I DIR echo DIR
wontprint.txt
x.cmd
x.pl
x.sh


xargs (GNU findutils) 4.5.9 Packaged by Cygwin (4.5.9-2)

I agree that that is what happens, and that it does seem strange and buggy. I note, though, that -I *implies* -L 1, so the -L 1 is unnecessary. Perhaps the explicit mention of -L 1 "kills" the -I flag in xarg's command line processing. My guess is that this behavior is passed on from the upstream implementation and is not specific to cygwin, which means that the appeal for a change would probably need to be lodged elsewhere ...

Eliot Moss

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