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Comment by pkrumins | Hacker News Reader

The first example is super super bad here. Never pipe `ls`. When you feel like you need to pipe `ls`, then you know you want to use `find`.

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Yes, as I answered in another thread - this post is much more educational than practical. It's intended to teach how to use pipes and simple commands together. Explaining why piping `ls` is bad and what is the difference between `ls` and `find` commands would miss the point of the post and would be confusing :)

> this post is much more educational than practical.

I understand that you don't want to be mean but this post is neither. It's like a bad gun safety video where the alleged instructor points a loaded gun at school children and then looks down the barrel while polishing the trigger...

Could you explain why piping `ls` is so bad? Thanks!

This[1] has some good explanations, but as an example - spaces, special characters, etc in file names.

[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/128985/why-not-pars...

To be even more pedantic, you probably want to use a glob

There are a lot of times one only wants non-dotfiles in the current directory.

The find would be something like

  find . -not -path '*/\.*' -type f -depth 1

What advantages does that have over 'ls' for that case?

>What advantages does that have over 'ls' for that case?

The gp was talking about issues with piping from "ls |" and your particular case of "find" being more convoluted than "ls" isn't comparing that.

Example of the topic that gp was warning about:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/128985/why-not-pars...

[Also fyi... you may have meant "-maxdepth" instead of "-depth" in your example.]

FYI the zsh glob for this is `^.*`, e.g.:

    echo ^.*

will show all non-dotfiles in the current directory.

In my Zsh

    echo *

does not expand dotfiles. I guess there's some setopt for that.

You're right. Bored during meeting, go this to work:

    echo (*)#.*

This prints all dot files and regular files in the current directory. You do need to have `setopt EXTENDED_GLOB` somewhere in your zsh config.

I would recommend `find ... -exec`, but I still haven't figured out how to make it compose properly with other UNIX tools.

You may want to use file globbing instead. This is one I just used yesterday afternoon. I needed to search for a string in every .js or .jsx file in my project, but didn't want to include specs in the search.

    rg 'MySearchString' **/*.js[x]#~*spec*

Voila. Note that this is for zsh, and you need to set the EXTENDED_GLOB option. But once you do you'll find yourself rarely needing to reach for `find`.

Is it really better option? You can find "find" from every Linux system. For this sample, you would need to install zsh and enable globbing manually as well. It works only on your machine, but on the other hand there is chance learn something which applies everywhere.

I solve this problem by just having no spaces on my filesystem when I act.

Never?

ls |less

Nice! This is pretty the only exception. ls|more or ls|less.

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