--- Brian Dessent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <Snipped> > I've never heard of using '-' to ls this way. The > coreutils info page does list it as a common flag, > but my interpretation of the language > there is that it's only referring to programs that > act as input/output filters, not as a general- > purpose way of passing filename arguments. > That's why xargs exists.
How to use xargs is a definite hole in my knowledge. I have read the xargs info a few times, but I don't think I have understood it yet. I will go back to it and try to get it this time. > You can get ls-like output from find without any > other programs: > > find a -daystart -type f -mtime 7 -ls > > If you must use an external program, the usual way > to take the output from find and send it as > arguments is with xargs: > > find a -daystart -type f -mtime 7 | xargs ls -l Yes, I saw that in the info for the find "-ls" option, but in this case I am going to eventually substitute another external program for "ls" to process the filenames in another way. xargs would seem to be the correct answer for that, as you noted. > Note that both this and your '-printf " %p"' method > will not work for filenames that contain spaces or > special characters. Therefore the superior way of > doing this is: > > find a -daystart -type f -mtime 7 -print0 | xargs -0 > ls -l Not a problem in this case, the filenames to be processed are space-less and without any special characters because of the program that creates them. Thanks anyway for the info, I will remember it. <Snipped> > It doesn't work under linux either. (It's the same > coreutils code in either case.) Understood. Many thanks for reducing my level of ignorance. Peter __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/