Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 08:32:40 +0100 From: F.Xavier Noria <fxn@retemail.es> To: Bsd Neophyte <bsdneophyte@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: question about the 'find' command Message-ID: <20020307083240.2eaec696.fxn@retemail.es> In-Reply-To: <20020307020236.7623.qmail@web20110.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20020307020236.7623.qmail@web20110.mail.yahoo.com>
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On Wed, 6 Mar 2002 18:02:36 -0800 (PST)
Bsd Neophyte <bsdneophyte@yahoo.com> wrote:
: an example they give is the following:
:
: $ find ~ -name core -exec rm {} \;
Besides the other answers, I would like to add that while that use of
-exec is popular, it is doing the job as a side effect, since we discard
the boolean value resulting from the execution of "rm". I mean, "find"
provides boolean operators to filter its ouput, -name, -or, -newer, and
-exec are examples. The unary -exec returns a boolean value according
to the exit status of the executed command.
That's why when I want to do something with the filenames resulting from
running "find", I prefer to pass them to the actual command like this:
$ find ~ -name core | xargs rm
Just my philosophical 2 cents.
-- fn
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