[joosters]

Once again, you're getting too hung up on my dumb little example, which I spent exactly 0 seconds thinking about. It's the general problem that's interesting (and annoying), the 'command1 | command2' general case.

If you want a difficult example, then take a more real-world example: e.g. the workflow of a 'find [some stuff] |grep [some other stuff]' is one to consider. That's where horrid workarounds like -print0 and -z have to come in, but the simple 'find|grep' works fine up until a file has a space in it.

As I said, there's no simple fix, even for the re-organised form of 'grep [some other stuff] `find [some stuff]` because the shell can't tell the difference between a filename and just a stream of text in the output of one program.

[kps]

The (ex) AT&T Research command tw(1) has pretty much replaced find(1) for me (particularly with some canned search selectors for particular projects).

[joosters]

I'm struggling to find any information on this command (it's not an easy name to search for!) Do you have any links you could share please?

[kps]

Apologies, I forgot to include a link: The toolkit is now at https://github.com/att/ast since AT&T laid off the group a couple years ago.

About half the package consists of evolutions of traditional Unix commands. The parts I use regularly are ksh and tw. tw ('tree walk') is sort of a 'find --exec' replacement with a C-like selector syntax. It's a bit verbose, so for interactive use I generally set up project-specific shell aliases with selection expressions, e.g.

  alias cctw=$'tw -e "select: return (type == REG) && ((name == \'*.c\') || (name == \'*.h\') || (name == \'*.cpp\') || (name == \'*.cc\') || (name == \'*.h\') || (name == \'*.hpp\') || (name == \'*.mm\') || (name == \'*.inc\'));" '

and then use those, e.g.

  cctw egrep -w MyIdentifier

[joosters]

Thanks, this looks interesting!

[txutxu]

If I could need to combine a find|grep right now (this is, if the directory recursion and filters of grep by itself, weren't enough, which maybe a corner case too...) I could do it like this:

    while IFS= read -rd '' file; do
      echo "do whatever with: $file"
      grep whatever -- "$file"
    done < <(find ~/whatevers -print0)

It's like natural language if you do it daily.

Will handle not only spaces, but also

new

lines

on

file

names.

Have a nice day.

[joosters]

You miss my point. Of course, for every example I give, it's possible to build a workaround to handle the spaces. My point is, it's the very fact that you need a workaround that makes it so irritating.

[txutxu]

For me, the code I did give, is not a workaround.

It's the canonical way of do it.

Other ways, even if they are "expected to work by inexperienced occasional users"... are simply flawed a first eye view.

A workaround is to ditch shell script, as soon as you face a problem, and blame shell script, and turn to do it in a "more advanced language" that has the same or more caveats. That could be a workaround.

Delimiting file names with null bytes, in case they could be split by any of the $IFS values, is NOT a workaround, is pure logic.