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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers use of xargs and prune piping with find command. Post 302281115 by rwuerth on Wednesday 28th of January 2009 08:29:26 AM
Old 01-28-2009
the -prune option prevents find from walking a subdirectory underneath it's current location. Without prune, you might print a listing as follows:

file1
file2
dir1
dir1/file1
dir1/file2
file3
file4

With prune you would print a listing like this:

file1
file2
dir1
file3
file4

When the command is piped into xargs followed by another command like the 'rm' in your example xargs acts as like a loop for the input coming from the pipe and runs the command (rm -f ) for each line of input.

The directory wont be removed by rm -f but the error will be sent to /dev/null so the user wont see this. The effect is that the files will be removed but not the directories, nor the files in the directories.
 

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diff3(1)						      General Commands Manual							  diff3(1)

Name
       diff3 - 3-way differential file comparison

Syntax
       diff3 [-ex3] file1 file2 file3

Description
       The command compares three versions of a file, and publishes the ranges of text that disagree, flagged with the following codes:

	  ====	      all three files differ

	  ====1       file1 is different

	  ====2       file2 is different

	  ====3       file3 is different

       The type of change needed to convert a given range of a given file to some other is indicated in one of these ways:

	  f : n1 a    Text is to be appended after line number n1 in file f, where f = 1, 2, or 3.

	  f : n1 , n2 c
		      Text is to be changed in the range line n1 to line n2.  If n1 = n2, the range may be abbreviated to n1.

       The original contents of the range follows immediately after a c indication.  When the contents of two files are identical, the contents of
       the lower-numbered file is suppressed.

Options
       -3   Produces an editor script containing the changes between file1 and file2 that are to be incorporated into file3.

       -e	   Produces an editor script containing the changes between file2 and file3 that are to be incorporated into file1.

       -x	   Produces an editor script containing the changes among all three files.

Examples
       Under the -e option, publishes a script for the editor that incorporates into file1 all changes between file2 and  file3  -  that  is,  the
       changes	that would normally be flagged ==== and ====3.	Option -x (-3) produces a script to incorporate only changes flagged ==== (====3).
       The following command applies the resulting script to `file1':
       (cat script; echo '1,$p') | ed - file1

Restrictions
       Text lines that consist of a single `.'	defeat -e.

Files
       /tmp/d3?????
       /usr/lib/diff3

See Also
       cmp(1), comm(1), diff(1), dffmk(1), join(1), sccsdiff(1), uniq(1)

																	  diff3(1)
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