3 ms·

> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces… Always use -0. Most gnu utilities support it. It makes them put a null byte after eve

by db48x 3mo ago

> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces… Always use -0. Most gnu utilities support it. It makes them put a null byte after every filename instead of a newline. Completely eliminates the problem of dealing with whitespace in the filenames.

AdieuToLogic 3mo ago
To support your recommendation and redress the strawman the article postulates, the post's author could have replaced: find . -name '*.log' | xargs rm With: find . -name '*.log' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
- tjalfi 3mo ago
  This one doesn't need xargs. find . -name '*.log' -delete
  - sgarland 3mo ago
    THANK YOU. I kept nodding along to all of the xargs comments, thinking “sure, but what about the even easier solution?”
    - adolph 3mo ago
      As well as find has an -exec param to perform things one at a time or all with the same command by using a slash semicolon or a plus sign respectively: #order files from different levels in a file hierarchy by size: find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec ls -hlrS {} + #output metadata for each file sequentially find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec file {} \;
jsrcout 3mo ago
For tools that don't support -0, you can add the NULs yourself without much fuss. It's a one-liner in awk/perl/sed. Very handy.
- ykonstant 3mo ago
  If you do not have -0 options in your xargs/find, I wonder if you will have those extensions in your awk/sed. Perl is a different story.
  - MrDOS 3mo ago
    I think the parent was referring to using awk/sed to do the equivalent of: find ... | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 ... I.e., a blind replacement without the tool having any particular semantic understanding of what it's translating. That still requires your xargs to have -0 support, though, and I'd be surprised to have that without the corresponding option on find. But I've done this before when feeding xargs from something other than find.
    - mr_mitm 3mo ago
      It is also built on the assumption that filenames never contain newlines, which is wrong in general. It's baffling to me that POSIX allows non-printable characters in file names, but here we are. Surely they had a reason for this decision.
      - db48x 3mo ago
        That’s changing, maybe eventually even on real systems: https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-nuclear-option https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-nuclear-option
dieulot 3mo ago
No dependency on GNU required anymore, POSIX 2024 supports it: https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-null-option https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-null-option
- db48x 3mo ago
  Neat, I didn’t know that! Even cooler that they’ve started to change all the core utilities to error out instead of creating a file with a newline character in it.

by db48x 3mo ago

AdieuToLogic 3mo ago

To support your recommendation and redress the strawman the article postulates, the post's author could have replaced: find . -name '*.log' | xargs rm With: find . -name '*.log' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

tjalfi 3mo ago
This one doesn't need xargs. find . -name '*.log' -delete
- sgarland 3mo ago
  THANK YOU. I kept nodding along to all of the xargs comments, thinking “sure, but what about the even easier solution?”
  - adolph 3mo ago
    As well as find has an -exec param to perform things one at a time or all with the same command by using a slash semicolon or a plus sign respectively: #order files from different levels in a file hierarchy by size: find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec ls -hlrS {} + #output metadata for each file sequentially find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec file {} \;

jsrcout 3mo ago

For tools that don't support -0, you can add the NULs yourself without much fuss. It's a one-liner in awk/perl/sed. Very handy.

ykonstant 3mo ago
If you do not have -0 options in your xargs/find, I wonder if you will have those extensions in your awk/sed. Perl is a different story.
- MrDOS 3mo ago
  I think the parent was referring to using awk/sed to do the equivalent of: find ... | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 ... I.e., a blind replacement without the tool having any particular semantic understanding of what it's translating. That still requires your xargs to have -0 support, though, and I'd be surprised to have that without the corresponding option on find. But I've done this before when feeding xargs from something other than find.
  - mr_mitm 3mo ago
    It is also built on the assumption that filenames never contain newlines, which is wrong in general. It's baffling to me that POSIX allows non-printable characters in file names, but here we are. Surely they had a reason for this decision.
    - db48x 3mo ago
      That’s changing, maybe eventually even on real systems: https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-nuclear-option https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-nuclear-option

dieulot 3mo ago

No dependency on GNU required anymore, POSIX 2024 supports it: https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-null-option https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu#the-null-option

db48x 3mo ago
Neat, I didn’t know that! Even cooler that they’ve started to change all the core utilities to error out instead of creating a file with a newline character in it.