find and \b

brian0918 · 06-26-2003, 04:41 PM

In the find manual, it says you can use \b in the -printf action to "Backspace", but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. What I wanted to do was get rid of the file extension when the filename is printed out. I know that the extensions are all 6 characters long, so I tried:

find . -name 'bleh*.*' -printf "%f\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\n"

What I had hoped this would do was, for example if it found "blehabc.123456", it would only print "blehabc", but it just prints "blehabc.123456"

What, then, is \b used for?

moses · 06-26-2003, 05:33 PM

The backspace doesn't, necessarily, remove a character, it moves the "cusor" back one space. If you do something like this:

Code:

find . -name 'bleh*.*' -printf "%f\b\b\b\b\b\b\b       \n"

You'll have what you want, visually. However, this just replaces the .123456 with

Code:

"^H^H^H^H^H^H^H          ".

If you redirect the output to a file and vi, emacs, or pico it, you'll see what I mean.

To get what you want, you need to pipe the output to another command like cut or awk:

Code:

fine . -name 'bleh*.*' -printf "%f\n" | cut -d"." -f1