OT -- BASH

[Paul Heinlein <heinlein (at) madboa.com>]

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006, William L. Maltby wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 07:21 -0500, Robert wrote:
> > Can someone explain why this:
> >    find . -depth -print0 | cpio --null -pmd /tmp/test
> > will copy all files in and below the current directory -and- this:
> >    find . -depth -print | grep -v .iso$ | wc -l
> > will count all the non-iso files -and- this:
> >    find . -depth -print | grep  .iso$ | wc -l
> > will count *only* the iso files -but- this:
> > find . -depth -print0 | grep -v .iso$ | cpio --null -pmd /tmp/test
> > doesn't copy *anything*?
> > Any suggestions for a work-around would also be most welcome.
>
> Replace the print0 with print. If you need to know why, redirect your
> find print0 output to a file & then do an od -c on it.
>
> Hint: cpio expects one entry per line (in spite of what it did for you)
> and grep operates on lines of input. If it's not clear after doing the
> od -c, call again.  :-)

cpio, like xargs, can accept an argument list terminated by a null 
character rather than whitespace. That what the OP was doing with the 
--null switch (aka -0, also possible with xargs). It's very helpful 
with unpredictable filenames.

--
Paul Heinlein <heinlein (at) madboa.com>
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