UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

"rm -rf" removes files too so can't be the issue.
You don't need these double quotes, spaces are already preserved without them so this can neither be the issue.

Code:

$ touch "a b"
$ find . -type f -name "* *" -exec ls -l {} +
-rw-r--r--   1 jlliagre jlliagre       0 Aug 26 23:23 ./a b

YOU GUYS ROCK!!! .. Thank You! Much appreciated ... so the answer was the fact that the curly brackets needed quotes .. "{}" .. I now have a working script.

Again Linux and even more so, "Linux People" save the day!

Regards
Dean

This is odd. They shouldn't be needed. I guess you aren't using the regular "rm" command but some broken wrapper.

Also, if you work on Gnu/Linux, it might help if you tell it in the first place.

It always helps to know which shell and which Operating System and version.
There is much variation in the "find" command.
The "{}" syntax was certainly needed in Berkeley unix, SCO unix and Unix System V.

Great ... I'll include those details next time first, sorry .. just getting the hang of posting as such .. First Linux post ... But great I guess this thread an be closed. Must I do that or will the forum do that?

I don't remember having see that behavior with these OSes but filenames with embedded spaces were rare at that time. Anyway, have you examples of currently used find implementations that exhibit this behavior (outside Dean's experience which is perplexing me) ?

I believe that would violate the POSIX standard if I understand it correctly:

Quoted from http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/...ties/find.html

An argument containing only the two characters "{}" shall be replaced by the set of aggregated pathnames, with each pathname passed as a separate argument to the invoked utility in the same order that it was aggregated.

Whatever O/S Dean_Rotherham is using should go on the list.

I have seen the problem so many times that I use the quote syntax out of habit (whether or not it is necessary on some O/S). If you are dealing with filenames or other strings which contain space characters just use quotes.

I really am the wrong person to discuss POSIX because I live in the real world and have seen many "standards" come and go.

The quote you supply is wonderfully ambiguous though to my mind it describe all the effects I have seen from all the versions of "find .... -exec" .