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db48x • today at 3:18 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces…

Always use -0. Most gnu utilities support it. It makes them put a null byte after every filename instead of a newline. Completely eliminates the problem of dealing with whitespace in the filenames.

Replies

AdieuToLogic • today at 3:28 AM

To support your recommendation and redress the strawman the article postulates, the post's author could have replaced:

  find . -name '*.log' | xargs rm
With:

  find . -name '*.log' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
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jsrcout • today at 7:42 AM

For tools that don't support -0, you can add the NULs yourself without much fuss. It's a one-liner in awk/perl/sed. Very handy.

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