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.
which is why I'm for ever telling people, "Don't do that." Especially in
scripts.
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 {} \;
Note: watch out for spaces in names. They're legal, but cause havoc for
the unwary.
Homework:
Read the man pages for
find
bash <:-)>
xargs
--
Cheers
John
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