piping output of find to another command or loop
 

Hi

I am trying to run a find command on a directory and then pipe the output to either awk or into a loop for further processing. My find command works fine and outputs line of results, however, when I try to pipe the output to another command or loop, nothing happens, it just freezes. The command I am currently trying is:

find /media/backups/rsnapshots/ -name "CTG\.fp5" | while read i; do ls -l $i; done

I cannot understand what is stopping this from working as the output from the find on its own is simply lines of output, I have done plenty of googling and cannot `find` the answer. Maybe I'm just being a bit dim. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The syntax looks correct. Can you show us the output of the find command by itself?

The syntax looks ok. You could try this instead :-

find /media/backups/rsnapshots/ -name "CTG\.fp5" -exec ls -l '{}' \;

output
 

the output of the find command I was using was this:

/media/backups/rsnapshots/weekly.1/mnt/FM_daily_backups/Wednesday/CTG.fp5
/media/backups/rsnapshots/weekly.1/mnt/FM_daily_backups/Friday/CTG.fp5
/media/backups/rsnapshots/weekly.1/mnt/FM_daily_backups/Tuesday/CTG.fp5
/media/backups/rsnapshots/weekly.1/mnt/FM_daily_backups/Sunday/CTG.fp5
/media/backups/rsnapshots/weekly.1/mnt/FM_daily_backups/Thursday/CTG.fp5

Arfa that works great, thanks. What does the " '{}' \ " bit do?

And I am still confused about why my find command won't pipe to a loop or awk.

You could use a for loop, especially if you want to do more complex stuff than just 'ls'
NB the single quote stops shell interpolation, so you don't need to escape '.'

Here's a good page on the find cmd http://lowfatlinux.com/linux-find-files.html

Not that . has any special meaning in an argument to
name for find or in shell-globbing if it's not in the first
position of the path, anyway.



Cheers,
Tink

Hi Steven,

The '{}' puts the output of the find command in its place. If you do a "man find" you will see many options for the find command. There are heaps of great things you can do with the find command.

When I run your command on my system (Fedora 11 - find (GNU findutils)4.4.0)I get the following "error" :-

$ find . -name "song-name\.ogg"

find: warning: Unix filenames usually don't contain slashes (though pathnames do). That means that '-name `song-name\.ogg'' will probably evaluate to false all the time on this system. You might find the '-wholename' test more useful, or perhaps '-samefile'. Alternatively, if you are using GNU grep, you could use 'find ... -print0 | grep -FzZ `song-name\.ogg''.