[Gllug] C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie reported dead

[Philip Hands]

On Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:58:40 +0000, James Hawtin <oolon at ankh.org> wrote:
...
> Personally I hate using -exec (not sure why) and generally do a "find | 
> while read" insted, because a for loop from a glob has a finite number 
> of argument it can handle (however it is very large with linux these
> days).

Just noticed this rather late, and have to note that:

  find | while read ...

doesn't play well with filenames containing line-feeds:

  phil at poker:/tmp$ echo -e "touch 'hello\nthere'" | sh

  phil at poker:/tmp$ find -name hello\* | while read x ; do ls -l "$x" ; done
  ls: cannot access ./hello: No such file or directory
  ls: cannot access there: No such file or directory

which isn't what you want -- rather, one should use NUL terminated
strings using find's -print0, thus:

  phil at poker:/tmp$ find -name hello\* -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l
  -rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil 0 Nov 15 11:30 ./hello?there

BTW xargs has a -I option for when you need to substitute the name in,
but then I don't think you'll get the speed advantage you normally get
with xargs, since it's then needing to do as many execs as find:

  phil at poker:/tmp$ find -name hello\* -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} ls -l {}
  -rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil 0 Nov 15 11:30 ./hello?there

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
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