Wed 07 Sep 2005 02:39:27 PM UTC, original submission:
When debugging a recent xargs failure on cygwin, caused by a bug in cygwin's sysconf(_SC_ARG_MAX), I found in the source code that xargs supports --show-limits, and it turned out to be very useful in diagnosing the problem. This option is not documented anywhere, in xargs --help, the man page, or the info docs. Also, the source code builds the --show-limits longopt as mapping to 'S', but does not accept a short opt -S.
For the remainder of this bug report, you can feel free to ignore my requests, so long as the documentation accurately reflects the actual behavior (as long as it is undocumented, the behavior can be considered a bug, but if it is well documented, then I wouldn't be confused in the first place):
I thought it was rather confusing that --show-limits still insisted on reading stdin. I had to execute 'echo | xargs --show-limits' for a non-blocking printout of the current limits. I think it might be more intuitive if --show-limits printed the limits, then quit without doing any further action (thinking of --show-limits as a form of --help, but correctly taking into account the affects of -s or other options). On the other hand, the limit information could also usefully be printed during --verbose, where --verbose does imply continuing with execution by reading stdin.
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