[plug] grep + xargs = missing separator?

[James Devenish]

In message <5c99ee27040909013824b2cf0e at mail.gmail.com>
on Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 04:38:28PM +0800, Andrew Furey wrote:
> Hi all, an interesting problem for your Thursday afternoon/evening...

Or maybe even morning, for those in far-away lands. ;-)

> I've got a web interface to help clear out the mail spool (all those
> frozen spam bounce messages...). Part of it is parsing the output from
> a simple grep call, so I can reproduce the problem on the shell.

I got very much lost in that output, because of line wrapping. But I did
at least note that you said you used '--' somewhere. Please note that
'--' is used by various command-line argument parsers (e.g. getopt,
getopt_long, or whatever) to denote "end of switches". Hence, it has
special meaning. Maybe that is somehow related. But I'm not sure how it
could be. So, I will try to unwrap your lines and have another crack at
it later. Anyway, the other thing I noticed was:

find /var/spool/exim/input -name \*

I assume that the canonical alternative is

find /var/spool/exim/input -print

(Optimises out the pattern matching.)