[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [COREUTILS] dirname line commands
From: |
Eric Blake |
Subject: |
Re: [COREUTILS] dirname line commands |
Date: |
Fri, 21 Jul 2006 01:33:50 +0000 |
> dirname: too many arguments
> Try `dirname --help' for more information.
>
>
> instead i had to get jiggy and issue
>
> for i in `locate asterisk` ; do dirname $i ; done | sort | uniq
>
> why doesn't dirname eat the stdin from xargs ( i tried a bunch or xargs
> switches -d and -e to no avail.)
Because dirname is documented as taking exactly one argument,
thanks to POSIX. Try xargs -L 1 to force one filename per dirname
invocation (although that does turn into as many processes as your
for loop). Or consider using a sed script instead, to reduce the
process load of computing multiple dirnames over a list.
--
Eric Blake