Using find . -print0
find . -print0
seems to be the only safe way of obtaining a list of files in bash due to the possibility of filenames containing spaces, newlines, quotation marks etc.
However, I'm having a hard time actually making find's output useful within bash or with other command line utilities. The only way I have managed to make use of the output is by piping it to perl, and changing perl's IFS to null:
find . -print0 | perl -e '$/="\0"; @files=<>; print $#files;'
This example prints the number of files found, avoiding the danger of newlines in filenames corrupting the count, as would occur with:
find . | wc -l
As most command line programs do not support null-delimited input, I figure the best thing would be to capture the output of find . -print0
find . -print0
in a bash array, like I have done in the perl snippet above, and then continue with the task, whatever it may be.
How can I do this?
This doesn't work:
find . -print0 | ( IFS=$'\0' ; array=( $( cat ) ) ; echo ${#array[@]} )
A much more general question might be: How can I do useful things with lists of files in bash?
Shamelessly stolen from Greg's BashFAQ :
unset a i
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' file; do
a[i++]="$file" # or however you want to process each file
done < <(find /tmp -type f -print0)
Note that the redirection construct used here ( cmd1 < <(cmd2)
) is similar to, but not quite the same as the more usual pipeline ( cmd2 | cmd1
) -- if the commands are shell builtins (eg while
), the pipeline version executes them in subshells, and any variables they set (eg the array a
) are lost when they exit. cmd1 < <(cmd2)
only runs cmd2 in a subshell, so the array lives past its construction. Warning: this form of redirection is only available in bash, not even bash in sh-emulation mode; you must start your script with #!/bin/bash
.
Also, because the file processing step (in this case, just a[i++]="$file"
, but you might want to do something fancier directly in the loop) has its input redirected, it cannot use any commands that might read from stdin. To avoid this limitation, I tend to use:
unset a i
while IFS= read -r -u3 -d $'\0' file; do
a[i++]="$file" # or however you want to process each file
done 3< <(find /tmp -type f -print0)
...which passes the file list via unit 3, rather than stdin.
Maybe you are looking for xargs:
find . -print0 | xargs -r0 do_something_useful
The option -L 1 could be useful for you too, which makes xargs exec do_something_useful with only 1 file argument.
The main problem is, that the delimiter NUL (\\0) is useless here, because it isn't possible to assign IFS a NUL-value. So as good programmers we take care, that the input for our program is something it is able to handle.
First we create a little program, which does this part for us:
#!/bin/bash
printf "%s" "$@" | base64
...and call it base64str (don't forget chmod +x)
Second we can now use a simple and straightforward for-loop:
for i in `find -type f -exec base64str '{}' \;`
do
file="`echo -n "$i" | base64 -d`"
# do something with file
done
So the trick is, that a base64-string has no sign which causes trouble for bash - of course a xxd or something similar can also do the job.
另一种计算文件的方法:
find /DIR -type f -print0 | tr -dc '\0' | wc -c
Since Bash 4.4, the builtin mapfile
has the -d
switch (to specify a delimiter, similar to the -d
switch of the read
statement), and the delimiter can be the null byte. Hence, a nice answer to the question in the title
Capturing output of
find . -print0
find . -print0
into a bash array
is:
mapfile -d '' ary < <(find . -print0)
You can safely do the count with this:
find . -exec echo ';' | wc -l
(It prints a newline for every file/dir found, and then count the newlines printed out...)
I think more elegant solutions exists, but I'll toss this one in. This will also work for filenames with spaces and/or newlines:
i=0;
for f in *; do
array[$i]="$f"
((i++))
done
You can then eg list the files one by one (in this case in reverse order):
for ((i = $i - 1; i >= 0; i--)); do
ls -al "${array[$i]}"
done
This page gives a nice example, and for more see Chapter 26 in the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide .
Avoid xargs if you can:
man ruby | less -p 777
IFS=$'\777'
#array=( $(find ~ -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec printf "%s\777" '{}' \; 2>/dev/null) )
array=( $(find ~ -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec printf "%s\777" '{}' + 2>/dev/null) )
echo ${#array[@]}
printf "%s\n" "${array[@]}" | nl
echo "${array[0]}"
IFS=$' \t\n'
I am new but I believe that this an answer; hope it helps someone:
STYLE="$HOME/.fluxbox/styles/"
declare -a array1
LISTING=`find $HOME/.fluxbox/styles/ -print0 -maxdepth 1 -type f`
echo $LISTING
array1=( `echo $LISTING`)
TAR_SOURCE=`echo ${array1[@]}`
#tar czvf ~/FluxieStyles.tgz $TAR_SOURCE
This is similar to Stephan202's version, but the files (and directories) are put into an array all at once. The for
loop here is just to "do useful things":
files=(*) # put files in current directory into an array
i=0
for file in "${files[@]}"
do
echo "File ${i}: ${file}" # do something useful
let i++
done
To get a count:
echo ${#files[@]}
Old question, but no-one suggested this simple method, so I thought I would. Granted if your filenames have an ETX, this doesn't solve your problem, but I suspect it serves for any real-world scenario. Trying to use null seems to run afoul of default IFS handling rules. Season to your tastes with find options and error handling.
savedFS="$IFS"
IFS=$'\x3'
filenames=(`find wherever -printf %p$'\x3'`)
IFS="$savedFS"
Gordon Davisson's answer is great for bash. However a useful shortcut exist for zsh users:
First, place you string in a variable:
A="$(find /tmp -type f -print0)"
Next, split this variable and store it in an array:
B=( ${(s/^@/)A} )
There is a trick: ^@
is the NUL character. To do it, you have to type Ctrl+V followed by Ctrl+@.
You can check each entry of $B contains right value:
for i in "$B[@]"; echo \"$i\"
Careful readers may notice that call to find
command may be avoided in most cases using **
syntax. For example:
B=( /tmp/** )
Bash has never been good at handling filenames (or any text really) because it uses spaces as a list delimiter.
I'd recommend using python with the sh library instead.
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