xargs: unmatched single quote
 

I am trying to do a replacment of the user and group nobody:nobody with apache:apache. chown is missing files, and xargs is giving me the following:

find / -user nobody -group nobody -print | xargs chown apache:apache

xargs: unmatched single quote


Any help is appreciated.

Thanks in Advance.

Guy

Try running without the xargs and showing what find gives xargs.
Also try running without xargs. find has the ability to do the same thing with the -exec command

info find "Actions" "Run Commands" "Single File"

For more explenation of this really neat tool :)
Find does a lot more then just finding files.

I know your question was a long while back, but I just Googled for "xargs: unmatched single quote" and this was the top result, so I figured I'd add my $.02 here.

I was getting the same error, and found that my find command was returning filenames with single quotes (for example, "./mp3s/Rock/Ben Folds - Rockin' the Suburbs.mp3 "). This caused the unmatched single quote error in xargs. You could probably filter your find command through sed before xargs, but it's easier to use find -exec as teval suggests:

$ find / -user nobody -group nobody -exec chown apache:apache "{}" \;

where the files found are substitued for the braces, and the quotes around the braces will handle the odd single quote in a filename. Note that you end the -exec command with a semicolon, but escape it with a backslash to prevent the shell from seeing it as a separator.