Shell Scripting: Using bash with xargs

bash shell find xargs
Dan Monego picture Dan Monego · Oct 19, 2009 · Viewed 16.9k times · Source

I'm trying to write a bash command that will delete all files matching a specific pattern - in this case, it's all of the old vmware log files that have built up.

I've tried this command:

find . -name vmware-*.log | xargs rm

However, when I run the command, it chokes up on all of the folders that have spaces in their names. Is there a way to format the file path so that xargs passes it to rm quoted or properly escaped?

Answer

Emil Sit picture Emil Sit · Oct 19, 2009

Try using:

find . -name vmware-*.log -print0 | xargs -0 rm

This causes find to output a null character after each filename and tells xargs to break up names based on null characters instead of whitespace or other tokens.

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