UNIX Tips for the Elderly📌


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I often want to do something to a bunch of files on the filesystem.

E.g.

find Music/ | xargs -J % echo 'Do something to ' %

The problem is that sometimes the filenames have spaces in them which will cause:

find Music/ | xargs -J % 'Do something to ' %

xargs: unterminated quote

Useless.

Replace Beginning & End of Line with Quotes📌

The best fix I’ve managed to come up with is to replace the beginning and end of the line with quotes to make the shell happy.

E.g.

find Music/ | sed -e 's/^/"/' -e 's/$/"/'

Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Yael Naïm/Yael Naïm/03 New Soul.m4a

So now I can do things like:

find Music/ | sed 's/^/"/' | sed 's/$/"/' | xargs -J % ls -d %

Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Yael Naïm/Yael Naïm/03 New Soul.m4a

Or:

find Music/ | sed 's/^/"/' | sed 's/$/"/' | xargs -J % file %

Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Yael Naïm/Yael Naïm/03 New Soul.m4a:
  ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, iTunes AAC-LC