Why does xargs limit argument-sizes to 470 bytes?

[Kenneth Almquist]

The reason that xargs uses such a small limit is undoubtedly that is
was never changed when the maximum arg list size that exec would handle
was changed from 512 to 5120.  One of the reasons that xargs was written
was to deal with the 512 byte limitation.  I very rarely hit the 5120
byte limit.
				Kenneth Almquist
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