find returns unusable result

[Gary Kline]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 03:38:24PM -0800, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 28, 2007, Vince wrote:
> >Josh Tolbert wrote:
> >> On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 05:12:58PM -0600, Paul Schmehl wrote:
> >>> I'd like to cron a process that looks at a certain folder every day and 
> >>> changes the perms on a directory if they aren't what I want. 
> >>> Unfortunately, the people creating the folders are Windows folks using 
> >>> WinSCP, and so they create folders with spaces in them.  (E.g. Day 1, Day 
> >>> 2, etc.)
> >>>
> >>> I thought I could just do this:
> >>> chmod 755 `find /path/to/dirs -type d`
> >>>
> >>> but find returns a directory name of Day, Day, Day, which (obviously) 
> >>> doesn't work.
> >>>
> >>> >From the cli, find returns the actual directory name.
> >>>
> >>> How can I get find to return the dirs correctly in a script?  Or is there 
> >>> some other way to do this that would work?
> >>>
> >>> Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
> >> 
> >> find /path/to/dirs -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755
> >> 
> >or just
> >find /path/to/dirs -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
> >should do it.
> 
> While that works, the -print0 | xargs -0 is far more efficient as it isn't
> exec'ing a process for every match.  This may not be important for a few
> files or directories, but can make a significant difference when processing
> thousands of entries.


	I don't mean to steal this thread, but it might help to know if
	egrep -[xyz] bar or other things might be joined in the " | xargs"
	part of the pipeline.  Lots of times I'll want a find search to 
	print0 filename and egrep, say, -3 strings and search for
	substrings nearby.  The greps will recurse across many dirs with
	scores of files so I want to search to be efficient.  In other 
	words, how flexible is xargs?

	gary





> 
> Bill
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-- 
  Gary Kline  kline at thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix