how to output file names surrounded with quotes in SINGLE line?

bash unix find xargs
Ana picture Ana · May 18, 2011 · Viewed 37.9k times · Source

I would like to output the list of items in a folder in the folowing way:

"filename1"  "filename2" "file name with spaces" "foldername" "folder name with spaces"

In other words, item names must be in a single line, surrounded with quotes (single or double) and divided by spaces.

I know that 

find . | xargs echo

prints output in a single line, but I do not know how to add quotes around each item name.

This code is part of a bsh script. The solution can therefore be a set of commands and use temporary files for storing intermediate output.

Thank you very much for any suggestion.

Cheers, Ana

Answer

Benjamin A. picture Benjamin A. · Feb 28, 2013

You could also simply use find "-printf", as in :

find . -printf "\"%p\" " | xargs your_command

where:

%p = file-path

This will surround every found file-path with quotes and separate each item with a space. This avoids the use of multiple commands.

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