Re: Numerically sorted arguments (in shell)

 Geoff Clare <geoff@clare.See-My-Signature.invalid>:

Helmut Waitzmann wrote:
>

 If ‘p_sort’ is designed to output the sorted file names  separated by an ASCII NUL character rather than a newline  then, using the GNU version of ‘xargs’, one can feed that  output into ‘xargs’: >
>
   {
     p_sort P*.HTM 3<&- |
     xargs --null --no-run-if-empty -- sh -c \
     'exec 0<&3 3<&- "$@"' sh \
     viewer
   } 3<&0

>
NUL as a record separator is also supported by several other versions of xargs, and it is in the recently released POSIX.1-2024 standard. >

 I'm glad to read that.  I didn't know either.

In all of those it is specified with -0, so using -0 is more portable than the GNU-specific --null. >

 Yes, of course:  If ‘-0’ is in the POSIX standard, it is  preferable over ‘--null’.

POSIX.1-2024 also has -r although I think that's not as widely supported in current xargs implementations as -0. It should become better supported over time, though, so again I would suggest using -r rather than --no-run-if-empty for better future portability. >

 I didn't know, that ‘-0’ as well as ‘-r’ are more widely  available (with the same semantics) than just in the GNU  version.  To minimize the risk of having a ‘xargs’ version, which  by accident uses the options ‘-0’ or ‘-r’ with different  semantics than GNU ‘xargs’ does, I preferred the long options (in  particular ‘--no-run-if-empty’) over the short.