Shell Programming and Scripting

find -exec or xargs require an external command. There is no single standard external command to truncate a file; the cp /dev/null (target) command suggested by reborg is one of the possible ways to do it, or you could create an external command trunc in a shell script:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
for f in "$@"; do
  >"$f"
done

This merely masks out the loop from plain view, but if you always invoke it with only one file name argument, the loop isn't necessary (though it's simple enough, and supporting multiple target files is standard practice for shell commands).

Obviously, you could use a Perl script or cp /dev/null "$f" instead of the truncation through redirection.

ah, I misunderstood the "empty directory" bit, ty for clarifying

Code:

% print hmm > {1..5}
% head *
==> 1 <==
hmm

==> 2 <==
hmm

==> 3 <==
hmm

==> 4 <==
hmm

==> 5 <==
hmm
% : > *
% ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 radoulov radoulov 0 2008-07-21 22:34 1
-rw-r--r-- 1 radoulov radoulov 0 2008-07-21 22:34 2
-rw-r--r-- 1 radoulov radoulov 0 2008-07-21 22:34 3
-rw-r--r-- 1 radoulov radoulov 0 2008-07-21 22:34 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 radoulov radoulov 0 2008-07-21 22:34 5

This is Z-Shell.

If you insist to use find:

Code:

find . \( -name . -o -prune \) -type f -exec sh -c ':> "$1"' - {} \;