Re: stupid script tricks - slightly OT

[Randy Orrison <randy@orrison.com>]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 12:05:11PM -0400, jeff wrote:
| Allan Wind wrote:
| > cd /usr/local/share/icons; find / \( -name \*.gif -o name \*.jpeg -o
|   -name \*.jpg -o -name \*.tif -o -name \*.tiff \) -a -type f | xargs -i
|   ln -s \{\} .
| 
| this looks like it should indeed work...but when i
| try it, i get:
| 
| find: paths must precede expression
| Usage: find [path...] [expression]

That error usually means that you've missed quoting a metacharacter in the
find command...  e.g.

$ dir
afile	anotherfile

$ find . -name a* -print
find: paths must precede expression
Usage: find [path...] [expression]

Because what the shell executed as the command, after expanding the
wildcards, was
$ find . -name afile anotherfile -print

and 'anotherfile' only made sense to find as a '[path...]' since it didn't fit
as part of the '[expression]'.  The fix, in this case, is obviously to put
"s around the pattern.  Your case is a bit more complicated, but almost
certainly has the same problem: one of the wildcards is being expanded by
the shell instead of being passed to find.  You just need to find it, and
quote it.

-- 


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