Re: xargs blows up on files with stupid characters in their names

[Padraig Brady]

Jamie Zawinski wrote:

> Padraig Brady wrote:
>
> > #touch file\'1
> > #find file* -print0 | xargs -0
> > file'1
>
> So I assume you're saying "this is not a bug, use different args
> instead?"


Yes.


> I can't see any reason to favor the current xargs behavior: why would I
> *want* it to mis-interpret one file name as two?  If I give xargs a
> stdin of
>
>         foo' bar
>         blat' foop
>
> then it ought to just be invoking
>
>         execvp ("program", ["foo' bar", "blat' foop", 0]);
>
> Why is it interpreting shell-syntax characters in the input at all,
> instead of just using the line as-is?

Well for the reason stated, that you can support args with spaces
with the standard xargs parsing format. Now I'd say this came before
xargs -0 and is still there for backwards compatability? I agree
that this is of no use when you have -0, but in saying that you do
have -0 so use it :-)

Padraig.