Re: [newbie] Find and spaces in file names ... was oowriter2

[Neill Jones]

Neill Jones wrote: n Tuesday 23 May 2006 09:17 am, Duncan Anderson wrote: No problem. I like the mosquito/sledgehammer analogy. Tell me, do you know how to overcome the problem of file names being rejected by find when they contain spaces, etc.? No never had any of those probs, I think. What exactly do you mean? All files including the ones with spaces show up. I mostly use find in combination with cpio to copy/move contents from one (usually almost full) partition to another. Never lost a file. Just yesterday I copied a 7G partition's content (my old 32_bit / partition I still keep in reserve) from a dying HD to a new one. Compared 'em and didn't loose a single thing. Still boots up fine after editing its "/etc/fstab". the whole (lovely unixy) command is "find . | cpio -padm /mnt/new_partition" whilst being in the topmopst directory of the to be copied partition, BTW. I'll second that - just tried find on a set of files with spaces in their names and it finds them with no problems. If you want to pipe these through to other programs, you can use the -print0 (that's print and a zero) option which ends each file with a null rather than a newline (see man find). Then you can use xargs -0 to read them in. So you could do something like find . -iname "*.*" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i "searchitem" to find searchitem within a set of files with spaces. (The -i's mean case insensitive) Just for info and clarity: A minor extra to H.J.Bathoorns post ... in the above, it is not the -iname which causes problems with the spaces, it is the use of xargs. For example, find . | grep "filename" works as pointed out by Harm. Also find . -iname "*.txt" | grep "filename" will work with all .txt files found. In both cases this can be understood since find returns each find item with a new line after it. grep then just reads each line of standard in which is a full line with the file name on it. When these are combined together as parameters for xarg however the spaces are seen as parameter breaks and so cause problems. Then you need to use the -print0 and xargs -0 options. Regards Neill