Getting error "xargs unterminated quote" when tried to print the number of lines in terminal

macos xargs
Lena picture Lena · Jul 25, 2012 · Viewed 30.9k times · Source

I want to get the number of lines in my application. I am using this code:

find . "(" -name "*.m" -or -name "*.h" ")" -print | xargs wc -l

It is working fine in other applications but for one of my applications it is giving the error "xargs unterminated quote".

Answer

Gary G picture Gary G · Jul 25, 2012

Does one of your filenames have a quote in it? Try something like this:

find . "(" -name "*.m" -or -name "*.h" ")" -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l

The -print0 argument tells find to use the NULL character to terminate each name that it prints out. The -0 argument tells xargs that its input tokens are NULL-terminated. This avoids issues with characters that otherwise would be treated as special, like quotes.

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