Re: the joy and non-joy of globbing

Robert P. J. Day wrote:

  as a quick demonstration on how globbing might run into the shell
limits, try the following few commands.  first, just try:

  $ ls /*

the output of this command is not important, all that's important is
that the shell had to expand the wildcarding to generate the command
to run.

  if that worked, push it a bit harder:

  $ ls /*/*

  if that worked, a bit harder still:

  $ ls /*/*/*

sooner or later, you'll hit the shell's limit as to just how large a
command it can construct.

This is far more robust:
find <paths> <selection criteria>  <printing instructions> \
| while read name
  do something with ${name}
  done

or
find <paths> <selection criteria> <printing instructions>\
	| xargs --no-run-if-empty <more args> something with

Sometimes this is appropriate:
find <paths> <selection criteria> -exec prog {} \;

Homework:
Read the man pages for
find
bash <:-)>
xargs



--

Cheers
John

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