I'm trying to copy a bunch of files below a directory and a number of the files have spaces and single-quotes in their names. When I try to string together find and grep with xargs, I get the following error:
find .|grep "FooBar"|xargs -I{} cp "{}" ~/foo/bar
xargs: unterminated quote
Any suggestions for a more robust usage of xargs?
This is on MacOS 10.5.3 with BSD xargs.
find . -print0 | grep -z 'FooBar' | xargs -0 ...
I don't know about whether grep supports -z, nor whether xargs supports -0, on Leopard, but on GNU it's all good.
Look into using the --null commandline option for xargs with the -print0 option in find.
You might also be able to combine all of that into a single find command:
find . -iname "*foobar*" -exec cp "{}" ~/foo/bar \;
This will handle filenames and directories with spaces in them. You can use -name to get case-sensitive results.
(These command line arguments will work with GNU find; I don't know if they're available with BSD's or OS X's find.)
This is more efficient as it does not run "cp" multiple times:
find -name '*FooBar*' -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t ~/foo/bar
Be aware that most of the options discussed in other answers are not standard on platforms that do not use the GNU utilities (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, for instance). See the POSIX specification for 'standard' xargs behaviour.
I also find the behaviour of xargs whereby it runs the command at least once, even with no input, to be a nuisance.
I wrote my own private version of xargs (xargl) to deal with the problems of spaces in names (only newlines separate - though the 'find ... -print0' and 'xargs -0' combination is pretty neat given that file names cannot contain ASCII NUL '\0' characters. My xargl isn't as complete as it would need to be to be worth publishing - especially since GNU has facilities that are at least as good.
I have found that the following syntax works well for me.
find /usr/pcapps/ -mount -type f -size +1000000c | perl -lpe ' s{ }{\\ }g ' | xargs ls -l | sort +4nr | head -200
In this example, I am looking for the largest 200 files over 1,000,000 bytes in the filesystem mounted at "/usr/pcapps".
The Perl line-liner between "find" and "xargs" escapes/quotes each blank so "xargs" passes any filename with embedded blanks to "ls" as a single argument.
Bill Starr Fri, 23 Jan 2009, 5:40 pm EST
The perl version above won't work well for embedded newlines (only copes with spaces). For those on e.g. solaris where you don't have the gnu tools, a more complete version might be (using sed)...
find -type f | sed 's/./\\&/g' | xargs grep string_to_find
adjust the find and grep arguments or other commands as you require, but the sed will fix your embedded newlines/spaces/tabs.
I used a Bill Star's answer slightly modified on Solaris:
find . -mtime +2 | perl -pe 's{^}{\"};s{$}{\"}' > ~/output.file
this will put quotes around each line. I didn't use the '-l' option although it probably would help.
The file list I was going though might have '-' but not newlines. I haven't used the output file with any other commands as I want to review what was found before I just start massively deleting them via xargs.