coldgrnd

is the code of "Hecate: The Hex Editor From Hell" available to look at?

I was wondering about that, but is it really wrong? From what I found in the "BSD General Commands Manual":

Any arguments specified on the command line are given to utility upon each invocation, followed by some number of the arguments read from the standard input of xargs. The utility is repeatedly executed until standard input is exhausted.

and

-P maxprocs Parallel mode: run at most maxprocs invocations of utility at once.

The way I interpret that is that you could run xargs in parallel mode, but by default the "utility is repeatedly executed" in the same process.

s += $7 means "add the content of the 7th column to the total"

actually there is heaps of love for awk... so much actually that I'd rather spend a whole post on it than to "just" make it one item :)

wow...that's quite some statistical data you gathered! I tried this myself using this command:

    cat ~/.bash_history | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

turns out my .bash_history is clipped at it's default size-limit (500 lines). So I'll change that to gather more data for next year. My results started with: 147 clang++ 77 ls 54 cd 15 gs 14 rake 13 vim ...

where gs is short for "git status" ...and thanks for the hint about the substitution! I updated it on my page.

Most of what I learned about C++ I got from books, blogs and some great C++ guys (mostly from the boost community). I have to admit I did not read the standard at all.

could you give an example of a case where you hit undefined behavior since I hardly seem to recall a case where that bit me in the past? (I'm mostly working on embedded systems (PPC & ARM))

The cases that come to my mind for C++ all involve initialization...