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Hi,
I have generated a list of directories that I would like to use ls and grep on, but it is not working. I am using the command
Code:
cat directories.dat | xargs ls
and I get a whole lot of these errors:
Code:
ls: cannot access ./foo/bar/baz/grault/*: No such file or directory
but when I try the directories manually one at a time I find that they all exist and all have files in them. Same thing if I try to grep anything. What is going wrong?
The contents of the file and the working directory are fine. Just to clarify, if I run my xargs piped command I get
Code:
ls: cannot access ./foo/bar/baz/grault/*: No such file or directory
and lots more errors of the same sort, but then (without changing my working directory) if I type
Code:
ls ./foo/bar/baz/grault/*
it works just fine. I can't work out why. I've also tried changing the contents of the file so that the directories are given in full rather than with the ./ prefix, but that doesn't help.
(edit) I created the file using gawk. Could this have added some invisible delimiters or something that ls is choking on?
Last edited by TheBigH; 04-03-2011 at 06:12 PM.
Reason: a thought
Why not use a loop instead of xargs? The xargs has some limitations
that you won't experience using a loop. For example:
Code:
cat directories.dat | while read Dir; do ls "$Dir"; done
Also you don't mention anything about special characters. The * is
interpreted and possibly expanded into a set of files. If you have
space characters, tabs, slashes, back-slashes, question marks or
ampersands in any of the paths they will also be interpreted.
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