Extending find(1) to support -printf

[Oliver Fromme]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
 > On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 03:12:53AM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
 > > Also, some folks on #bsdports asked why I was bothering with this in the
 > > first place: mutt supports backticks to run shell commands inside of
 > > a muttrc file.  See "Building a list of mailboxes on the fly" below:
 > > 
 > > http://wiki.mutt.org/?ConfigTricks
 > > 
 > > Note the find ... -printf '%h ' method.  I can accomplish (just
 > > about) the same using `echo $HOME/Maildir/*`, but if I want to
 > > exclude an entry, I can't use | grep -v, because mutt doesn't support
 > > pipes within backticks.  :-)
 > 
 > Follow-up:
 > 
 > mutt's backtick support does in fact respect pipes.  My echo|grep -v was
 > doing exactly what I requested: the grep -v was removing all output of
 > the echo, since echo returned the results in a space-delimited format,
 > not one per line.  Hence, "mailboxes" was being executed without any
 > arguments.
 > 
 > Equally as frustrating, mutt's backtick support will only honour the
 > first line of input.  If a backticked command returns multiple lines,
 > only the first is read; the rest are ignored.

Well, you can convert back and forth between spaces
and newlines with tr(1):

echo * | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -v whatever | tr '\n' ' '

It's not pretty, but it should work.  Note that ls(1)
prints one file name per line, so you can simplify the
above line like this:

ls | grep -v whatever | tr '\n' ' '

By the way, I often use zsh in such cases.  It supports
"extended globbing", for example, the wildcard expression
*~*.(gz|bz2) matches all files _except_ the ones that end
with .gz or .bz2.

Best regards
   Oliver

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