[Gllug] shell quoting problem

[Joachim Gleissner]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 10:47:13AM +0100, Alain Williams wrote:
> A little problem that is rearing its head more and more since some of my clients
> insist on creating files with spaces in the names. An example that happened just
> now:
> 
> I wanted to find files that had 'John Smith' as part of the name and 'ls' them.
> 
> 	ls -l $(locate 'John Smith')
> Doesn't work since the spaces are interpretted as argument separators - as I expected.
> 
> 	ls -l "$(locate 'John Smith')"
> Doesn't work since ls looks for a big long file name with embedded \n in it.
> 
> The simplest that I can achieve is:
> 
> 	(IFS=: ; ls -ld $(locate 'John Smith' | tr '\n' : ))

That will probably break for filenames with a : in it. How about this:

locate 'John Smith' | xargs -d'\n' ls -l


Joe
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