Comments on: Find is a beautiful tool

By: rdm

rdm — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:47:13 +0000

Find is a beautiful tool, but xargs is a warty beast. The problem is that there is no way good way to get xargs to respect the unix convention where the newline character delimits "records". The default from xargs is whitespace delimited arguments, which is almost the right thing, but not quite. Using -print0 in find and -0 in xargs gives us null delimited arguments which sort of mostly works, except [for example] when you want to pipe the result through grep and then another instance of xargs. (And this is perhaps motivated by the fact that some file systems allowed newline characters in file names. Clearly, that's a good reason to not support newline delimited records...) Another approach to work around this wart, is use grep -v ' ' (or grep -v '[ ]' where the second space there is replaced with a tab character). This strips out the lines which would be mishandled by xargs and you can pretend then that whitespace delimited data was what you really wanted.

By: Visto nel Web – 1 « Ok, panico

Visto nel Web – 1 « Ok, panico — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:00:54 +0000

[...] Find is a beautiful tool Ancora sui comandi della shell, in questo caso find. Ma è anche per segnalare tutto il blog (e a me piace anche il layout, da programmatore d’antan, ma non so se posso dirlo qui). ::: Eric Wendelin’s [...]

By: Andrew Richardson

Andrew Richardson — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:59:36 +0000

Find is especially useful when paired with loops (for/while). That’s when it saves me the most hassle

By: Noticeable Hacker News I Read(2011/07) | David Euler on programming, design and linux

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:48:16 +0000

[...] Find is a beautiful tool [...]

By: Eric Wendelin

Eric Wendelin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:13:28 +0000

If you have a particularly good article on Powershell in mind, I’ll be happy to put it in the article.

By: spuk

spuk — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 05:06:47 +0000

On Windows, it is actually worth it to learn Powershell.

By: bvk

bvk — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:16:13 +0000

Consider using this tool if in doubts: http://find.unixpin.com

By: mahmoudimus

mahmoudimus — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:00:15 +0000

Great article highlighting the importance of the good ol’ unix utilities.

I’m primarily writing this comment because I almost closed the page due to your blog’s color scheme / design. It’s simply too distracting. Lots of colors and no clear defining borders — for example, your shell commands are intertwined via the text, making it not easy on the eyes.

Hope this helps!