UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Sorry to insist but can you cite one of these OSes that implement find -exec that way ?

I will not entertain the argument that all unix versions in use in the commercial environment are POSIX-compliant.

Just checked an old one:

Code:

Sunos 4.1.1

It has come as a revelation to me that find can pass a parameter containing space characters to exec {} without quoting "{}" . The usual solution involves piping to "xargs", though in practice I don't use either method myself unless requested by a customer.
In case you are wondering I have tried it today on a couple of modern unix O/S and it works without the quotes.

On reflection, the POSIX versions are the anomaly.

I was expecting an interjection from cfajohnson, but "find" is an external command and not covered by the POSIX shell.

There are many unix commands which I would like to see standardised but these are mostly to do with memory mapping, disc partitioning, and printing. (Controversial statement) POSIX avoids hardware.

I'm not surprised about your tests that match my experience. That leave the question about what find version the open poster is using unanswered ...

---------- Post updated at 10:21 ---------- Previous update was at 08:50 ----------

I'm afraid your conclusion seems incorrect. After some research, I'm now convinced no known implementation of the find command need quotes. The idea they are required, even while documented in various web location, can't be but a urban legend.
In fact, using single or double quotes cannot have any effect on the find command given the fact the shell is removing them before passing the {} argument to the find command. Should you use a non standard shell that keep them, find behavior would be unspecified.

Heyo guys,

I thought I'd just confirm my OS, nothing abnormal and if anything probably one of the most common OS, I'm on ubuntu. (So guess Debian) ... I will confirm though that without the quotes it definately doesn't work. I'm running the script on 50+ remote pc's and I get the same result on ALL. SO, not sure .. Sorry, Hope I didn't start chaos here ... Chat soon and I'll keep my eyes here for what the final conclusion is?

Regards
Dean

No chaos at all, just an interesting discussion.

Can you run these commands on your machine to figure out what is going on:

Code:

touch "/tmp/find test"
find /tmp -name "find*test" -exec /bin/ls -l {} \;
find /tmp -name "find*test" -exec rm -i {} \;

Hi jlliagre. No urban legend. Hands on commercial experience of a very wide range of unix flavours and of their predecessors. Sometimes I only find out oddities when porting tried-and-tested scripts and they misbehave. I don't have "ubuntu" Linux handy though.
One SCO unix came with a standard cron to clean /tmp which failed if there were filenames containing spaces or there were lots of files. Sound familiar?

I'm not telling SCO scripts or any other ones can't be buggy, or course they can. I'm just telling I'm convinced using simple or double quotes around the {} in a find -exec statement does not and cannot have any effect. Of course it doesn't hurt to use them, just like the following commands works equally fine:

Code:

echo hello
echo "hello"

My point is these quote are unnecessary and not required regardless of the filename. I have no problem if you prove me wrong so feel free to demonstrate the quote are necessary with some OS, but do it with facts.