Re: [PATCH] xargs with large (or zero) max-procs

[James Youngman]

On Jan 5, 2008 5:25 PM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:

> Ultimately, if this is a real issue in practice, the solution would be a
> gnulib module that provides waitpid replacements for lacking systems.  But
> most likely, nobody actively ports to those old platforms any more.  Also,
> gnulib already has a wait-process module, so I wonder if it would be
> useful here.

I looked at it, and it's not.   The main problem is that too much
information about the fate of the process is irreversibly (afaict)
conflated into a single return value.   The xargs program needs to do
different things depending on whether the program exited or was killed
by a fatal signal, for example.

When we fix the issue with child processes that exit with status 126,
this will get a little more complex, too (xargs should return 123 for
that case, but actually returns 126, iirc).

James.