Of course, you will only run into trouble if your xargs is broken. The point of using xargs is to avoid the problem you are describing.

++Abigail-II. The fact was not mentioned on my Linux' xargs man page. But it was on Solaris':

     The generated command line length will be  the  sum  of  the
     size  in bytes of the utility name and each argument treated
     as strings, including a null byte  terminator  for  each  of
     these strings. The xargs utility will limit the command line
     length such that when the command line is invoked, the  com-
     bined   argument  and  environment  lists  will  not  exceed
     {ARG_MAX}-2048 bytes. Within this constraint, if neither the
     -n  nor the -s option is specified, the default command line
     length will be at least {LINE_MAX}.

Not very clear, indeed. But one can go by abstraction :-) and suppose that the line length limit will be circumvented!

Thanks, I learnt something new!

Ciao!
--bronto

---

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz