Re: Unix-ify File Names

[Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu>]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 09:05:56PM +0200, Frank Terbeck wrote:
> Daniel Barclay <daniel@fgm.com>:
> > Some commands do provide fully general mechanisms.  (For example,
> > find's -print0 and xargs' -0 option can handle any possible file
> > pathname, including one with newline characters.)  However, many
> > commands do not.  That typically makes it very difficult to
> > handle "special" characters.
> 
> Most programs do support filenames with special characters (if they
> don't it is clearly a bug). They just depend that the shell gives them
> the correct string.
> 
> Btw: xargs is not needed if your find binary is reasonably POSIX
> compliant. Just use '+' instead of ';' with the -exec option. (Yes, I
> know that GNU find didn't support this for quite some time.)
 
Wow... never heard of this and was going to ask more about it, but I see
it's in the find(1) manpage post-sarge. I use find a lot, xargs only
when it seems necessary, but the standard response to someone using find
has been that it's bad due to spawning umpteen processes. Looks like
that's no longer the case! 

Hmm, -execdir looks new as well, and very useful...

Thanks!

Ken

-- 
Ken Irving