Shell Programming and Scripting

hi,

i've been trying to figure this weird error but I cannot seem to know why. I am using below find command:

Code:

find . \( ! -name . -prune \) -type f -mtime +365 -print

The above code returns no file because no files are really more then 365 days old. However, when I use xargs, its returning all the files on the directory.

Code:

find . \( ! -name . -prune \) -type f -mtime +365 | xargs ls

What seems to be the problem with this. I need to use xargs to delete the files find by the find command later on. (when i used exec its working perfectly fine). It will go through a lot of files so I prefer using xargs than exec on this.

Can anyone help me how to use xargs on this? It is weird that on some directory, xargs is working ok. What seems to be the problem?

xargs just do an ls command without any arguments, something like:

Code:

echo "" | xargs ls

Try it with -exec:

Code:

find . \( ! -name . -prune \) -type f -mtime +365 -exec ls {} \;

Hi.

It seems that the implementation of xargs varies.

On OS X, it returns nothing if find returns nothing. On Solaris, it behaves as you posted.

Try:

Code:

find ... | xargs -I{} ls {}

@Franklin52: Thanks but I prefer to use xargs as the processing is faster
@scottn: i am using solaris. your solution works! thanks a bunch

Make sure you have a backup of all your files

Code:

find . -type f -mtime +365 -delete

Code:

find . -type f -mtime +365 -printf '"%p"\n' | xargs -i rm -fv {}

Hi.

Two points.

Never noticed that in the man page. I like to be POSIX compliant, do I just replace -i with -I (GNU findutils)?

Thanks!