CategoryComputingTips > FileUtilsCompTips

FileUtils Tips

Using find

• find is really useful and once you get the hang of it you probably want to use the -exec thing but this it isn't hugely clear that you have to escape the terminating ; from the shell. You use {} to substitute for the name of the file found.

find . -name '*.c' -exec echo foo {} \;

• You can also use xargs for this to save spawning one process for each file.

find . -name '*.c'|xargs grep foobar

• When your filenames have spaces in and you want to use find and xargs together use the -print0 and -0 flags to null terminate the strings find passes to xargs and conversely so xargs knows it's gettings null terminated input.

find . -name '*.c' -print0|xargs -0 grep foobar