From owner-freebsd-questions  Thu Mar 11 16:39:46 1999
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Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:07:24 +0000
From: Ben Smithurst <ben@scientia.demon.co.uk>
To: Glen Mann <gmann@cyberia.com>
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: find usage in shell script
Message-ID: <19990311220724.A52801@scientia.demon.co.uk>
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Glen Mann wrote:

> Can somebody explain why I can do this on the command line
> 
> find ./data -type f -exec chown nobody {} \; \
>                     -exec chgrp nogroup {} \; \
>                     -exec chmod 664 {} \;
> 
> But not in a Bourne shell script?  When I run the script with the backslashes
> to break up the command to make it readable, I get this
> 
>   # ./fix_perms
>   find: : unknown option
>   -exec: not found
>   #
> 
> Where is the second colon on the find: error line coming from?  To get around
> this, I have everything on a single line in the script, but that's not very
> "pretty!"  :)

All I can think is that you have a space after one of the trailing
backslashes in the shell script, or something. You might also need to
quote the {}, though I'm pretty sure a) sh doesn't understand {a,b}
things anyway, and b) shells that do leave {} alone because find uses
it. So that probably isn't it.

Incidentally, passing find's output into xargs might be more efficient.

e.g.

tmp=`mktemp _filenamesXXXXXX` || { echo mktemp failed; exit 1; }
find ./data -type f > $tmp
xargs chown nobody < $tmp
xargs chgrp nogroup < $tmp
xargs chmod 644 < $tmp
rm $tmp

Perhaps not as pretty, but your script will mean running three processes
for each file found. Xargs will supply as many filenames as possible from
the input, to the arguments of the specified command, without making the
command line too long.

-- 
Ben Smithurst
ben@scientia.demon.co.uk

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