Hacker News Reader

Using the output of find into another program is not safe due to risk of file names containing delimiters. You need to use find -exec.

Good example of why machine readable output is important. Agree that the tutorial should showcase more and larger such examples.

View on HN

Yes, I know that, but it's also exceedingly rare for a filename to contain a newline and using -exec is extremely inefficient. I also wrote that on my iPad. Typically I'd use a combination of -print0 and xargs -0 for anything more formal than a one-liner on the command line.

The larger bug in my example is that it fails if any of the directories in the path contain a "." in their name!

xargs also is good to use on big argument lists because it can parallelize the processing of arguments with the '-n' and '-P' flags.

You can always use -print0. I suppose there is some risk of a null slipping into a filename but I’ve never come across it myself.

> some risk of a null slipping into a filename

Only in some fairly esoteric environments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename#Comparison_of_filenam...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com