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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 SYNOPSIS
file1 file2 file3 DESCRIPTION
compares three versions of a file, and prints disagreeing ranges of text flagged with these codes: all three files differ file1 is different file2 is different file3 is different The type of change required to convert a given range of a given file to some other is indicated in one of these ways: Text is to be appended after line number n1 in file f, where f = or Text is to be changed in the range line n1 through line n2. If n1 = n2, the range can be abbreviated to n1. The original contents of the range follows immediately after a indication. When the contents of two files are identical, the contents of the lower-numbered file is suppressed. Produces a script for the editor that can be used to incorporate into file1 all changes between file2 and file3 (see ed(1)); i.e., the changes that normally would be flagged and Produces a script to incorporate only changes flagged Produces a script to incorporate only changes flagged Produces a script that will incorporate all changes between file2 and file3, but treat overlapping changes (that is, changes that would be flagged with in normal listing) differently. The overlapping lines in both files will be inserted by the edit script bracketed by and lines. Produces a script that will incorporate only changes flagged , but treat these changes in the manner of option. The following command applies the resulting script to file1. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
International Code Set Support Single- and multi-byte character code sets are supported. WARNINGS
Text lines that consist of a single period defeat Files longer than 64K bytes do not work. FILES
SEE ALSO
diff(1). diff3(1)
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