Re: OT: bash scripting question -- passing values to ls

[David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>]

Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> writes:

> here's something that ocmes up a lot for me:  
>
> I use locate to find a bunch of files:
>
> % locate charter | grep -i font
> /usr/share/texmf/fonts/afm/bitstrea/charter
> /usr/share/texmf/fonts/tfm/bitstrea/charter
> /usr/share/texmf/fonts/type1/bitstrea/charter
> /usr/share/texmf/fonts/vf/bitstrea/charter
>
> then I want to ls -l each of these files...

IMHO, the simplest way to do it is

  locate charter | grep -i font | xargs ls -l

but that will fail if the filenames have spaces or other whitespace in
them.  The very slow but reliable equivalent would be

  find / -name charter -path '*charter*' -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

or even

  find / -name charter -path '*charter*' -ls

but that doesn't do the caching that locate does.

(Other people have given good suggestions about using backticks to do
this as well.)

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell