Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 10:52:38 -0500 From: Scott W <wegster@mindcore.net> To: Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto <hlen@ig.com.br> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: newbie: to pipe the result of a program as commandlineparameter for another. Message-ID: <3FBF8646.7030905@mindcore.net> In-Reply-To: <3FBF67F5.1020704@ig.com.br> References: <3FBF67F5.1020704@ig.com.br>
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Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto wrote:
> You can use:
>
> find [whatever] -exec rm -rf '{}' \;
>
> or
>
> find [whatever] | xargs rm -rf
>
> Usually, the answer to your question would be: use xargs or put the
> second command between apostrophes. Something like:
>
> vi `which mozilla`
>
> I think if you use rm -rf `find [whatever]` it might work..
>
> DON'T use these lines unless you're absolutely sure your find will
> return exactly what you want.. rm -rf is the most destructive Unix
> command, so if you don't know what you're doing, maybe you should wait
> a couple of months until you do. :)
Amen ;-)
Seriously, the best thing you can do is just run the 'file listing' or
'data portion' of any command you're going to pipe together (or use
-exec, xargs, redirection) by ITSELF, to make sure you're getting the
expected results, sanity check the results, and THEN using command
history, bring up the same command and wrap it in backticks or add the
-exec or | xargs clause to it.
Consider the following, and what would happen if BOTH were executed blindly:
find /tmp -name "jre*" -exec rm {} \;
OK, life's happy, remove all jre* files in the /tmp heirarchy.
find / tmp -iname "jre.*" -exec rm {} \;
Oops, accidently put a space between / and tmp. Hope you didn't
actually WANT a working Java/jre on your system!
Sane way:
find /tmp -name "jre*"
check results
If OK, then use the SAME EXACT COMMAND via shell command line editing,
and just wrap or add to it:
find /tmp -name "jre*" -exec rm -f {} \;
Scott
> Read the man pages for rm, find and xargs so you can understand this.
>
> Best,
> --
> Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto <hlen@ig.com.br>
>
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