UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

@Corona688:

Interesting! But it's not exactly a tame little monster; as it output the entirety of my drive: No limits.

A bit startling to see the commandline rummaging the whole disk for more than a minute. A real shock as visions of dd danced through my head --



But, no harm seems done.

Thanks again for dropping in...

It does exactly what you asked for, yes.

find /path/to/subfolder/ ... if you actually wanted less

Note the / after subfolder is important. find doesn't care, but the resulting text will look slightly different without it, ruining your character-perfect output.

@Corona688:

Curious!

Was wondering why find | ... seemed content with just moseying over to recurse whatever is on the dir with it. Thought your find / -depth | ... was indicative of yet another syntactical secret handshake which seems to permeate the bash world...

So, is my syntax correct as find | ... to simply rummage the folder(s) on the immediate dir, or does convention call for a different approach? If OK, would running your snippet with find -depth | ... fit the bill for a quick recurse through local folders only?



---------- Post updated at 08:57 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:49 PM ----------

O -- one more quick question:

I've seen sed parameters both quoted and not in a pipe context. Both seem to work well... Is there a governing convention for this?

Thanks again --

The standard syntax for the find utility requires one or more pathname operands. Some implementations of find provide a pathname operand of . if you do not supply any pathname operands.

If there are any whitespace characters in your sed parameters or any other characters that have a special meaning in the shell, you have to quote those characters to keep the shell from modifying them before passing those parameters to sed.

The same reason 'ls' is, I suppose. That's what it's there for. There are no secret handshakes. find is an external command like everything else. Sure.