[SOLVED] What does the following shell script expression mean?

hyperfluid · 11-30-2010, 02:57 PM

Hey there,

I've found the following script to copy files specified by a find output into a target directory.

Code:

find $SOURCE -name "*.avi" | xargs -i cp -v {} $TARGET

What exactly does the colored expression mean? Does it refer to an array?

szboardstretcher · 11-30-2010, 03:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hyperfluid

Hey there,

I've found the following script to copy files specified by a find output into a target directory.

Code:

find $SOURCE -name "*.avi" | xargs -i cp -v {} $TARGET

What exactly does the colored expression mean? Does it refer to an array?

Thats just a copypasta kind of error you get when copy pasting from HTML pages. { = { and } = } The command should be:

Code:

find $SOURCE -name "*.avi" | xargs -i cp -v {} $TARGET

You might want to go through that entire script and make sure there are no more of those conversion errors.

hyperfluid · 11-30-2010, 03:51 PM

Thank you!
It was driving me crazy, that I've found nothing on this.

GrapefruiTgirl · 11-30-2010, 03:55 PM

FWIW, also note that eventually the -i option will maybe one day disappear. It's deprecated according to the xargs man page, which reads:

Quote:

This option is deprecated; use -I instead (that is an upper-case 'eye').