How can I use xargs to copy files that have spaces and quotes in their names

Question

I m trying to copy a bunch of files below a directory and a number of the files have spaces and single-quotes in their names   When I try to string together find and grep with xargs  I get the following error   find   grep  FooBar  xargs -I   cp        foo bar xargs  unterminated quote   Any suggestions for a more robust usage of xargs   This is on Mac nbsp OS nbsp X 10 5 3  Leopard  with BSD xargs

User · Answer

Be aware that most of the options discussed in other answers are not standard on platforms that do not use the GNU utilities (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, for instance). See the POSIX specification for 'standard' xargs behaviour.

I also find the behaviour of xargs whereby it runs the command at least once, even with no input, to be a nuisance.

I wrote my own private version of xargs (xargl) to deal with the problems of spaces in names (only newlines separate - though the 'find ... -print0' and 'xargs -0' combination is pretty neat given that file names cannot contain ASCII NUL '\0' characters. My xargl isn't as complete as it would need to be to be worth publishing - especially since GNU has facilities that are at least as good.

User · Answer

The easiest way to do what the original poster wants is to change the delimiter from any whitespace to just the end-of-line character like this   find whatever       xargs -d   n  cp -t  var tmp

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I have found that the following syntax works well for me   find  usr pcapps  -mount -type f -size  1000000c   perl -lpe   s        g     xargs ls -l   sort  4nr   head -200   In this example  I am looking for the largest 200 files over 1 000 000 bytes in the filesystem mounted at   usr pcapps    The Perl line-liner between  find  and  xargs  escapes quotes each blank so  xargs  passes any filename with embedded blanks to  ls  as a single argument

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Frame challenge     you re asking how to use xargs   The answer is  you don t use xargs  because you don t need it   The comment by user80168 describes a way to do this directly with cp  without calling cp for every file   find   -name   FooBar   -exec cp -t  tmp --        This works because    the cp -t flag allows to give the target directory near the beginning of cp  rather than near the end   From man cp        -t  --target-directory DIRECTORY          copy all SOURCE arguments into DIRECTORY     The -- flag tells cp to interpret everything after as a filename  not a flag  so files starting with - or -- do not confuse cp  you still need this because the - -- characters are interpreted by cp  whereas any other special characters are interpreted by the shell  The find -exec command      variant essentially does the same as xargs   From man find        -exec command                                                                    This  variant  of the -exec action runs the specified command on          the selected files  but the command line is built  by  appending          each  selected file name at the end  the total number of invoca-          matched  files    The command line is built in much the same way          that xargs builds its command lines   Only one instance of                is  allowed  within the command  and  when find is being invoked          from a shell  it should be quoted  for example        to protect          it  from  interpretation  by shells   The command is executed in          the starting directory   If any invocation  returns  a  non-zero          value  as exit status  then find returns a non-zero exit status           If find encounters an error  this can sometimes cause an immedi-          ate  exit  so some pending commands may not be run at all   This          variant of -exec always returns true     By using this in find directly  this avoids the need of a pipe or a shell invocation  such that you don t need to worry about any nasty characters in filenames

User · Answer

bill starr s Perl version won t work well for embedded newlines  only copes with spaces   For those on e g  Solaris where you don t have the GNU tools  a more complete version might be  using sed      find -type f   sed  s      amp  g    xargs grep string to find   adjust the find and grep arguments or other commands as you require  but the sed will fix your embedded newlines spaces tabs

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If find and xarg versions on your system doesn t support -print0 and -0 switches  for example AIX find and xargs  you can use this terribly looking code    find   -name   foo     sed -e  s        g  -e  s       g  -e  s       g    xargs cp  your dest   Here sed will take care of escaping the spaces and quotes for xargs   Tested on AIX 5 3

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find   -print0   grep --null  FooBar    xargs -0      I don t know about whether grep supports --null  nor whether xargs supports -0  on Leopard  but on GNU it s all good

User · Answer

find   perl -lne  print quotemeta    xargs ls -d   I believe that this will work reliably for any character except line-feed  and I suspect that if you ve got line-feeds in your filenames  then you ve got worse problems than this    It doesn t require GNU findutils  just Perl  so it should work pretty-much anywhere

User · Answer

I ran into the same problem  Here s how I solved it   find   -name   FoooBar     sed  s      amp       xargs cp   foo bar   I used sed to substitute each line of input with the same line  but surrounded by double quotes  From the sed man page      An ampersand     amp     appearing in the replacement is replaced by the string matching the RE     -- in this case      the entire line    This solves the xargs  unterminated quote error

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I used Bill Star s answer slightly modified on Solaris   find   -mtime  2   perl -pe  s        s          gt    output file   This will put quotes around each line  I didn t use the  -l  option although it probably would help   The file list I was going though might have  -   but not newlines  I haven t used the output file with any other commands as I want to review what was found before I just start massively deleting them via xargs

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You can combine all of that into a single find command   find   -iname   foobar   -exec cp --        foo bar      This will handle filenames and directories with spaces in them   You can use -name to get case-sensitive results     Note  The -- flag passed to cp prevents it from processing files starting with - as options

User · Answer

I have found that the following syntax works well for me   find  usr pcapps  -mount -type f -size  1000000c   perl -lpe   s        g     xargs ls -l   sort  4nr   head -200   In this example  I am looking for the largest 200 files over 1 000 000 bytes in the filesystem mounted at   usr pcapps    The Perl line-liner between  find  and  xargs  escapes quotes each blank so  xargs  passes any filename with embedded blanks to  ls  as a single argument

User · Answer

Look into using the --null commandline option for xargs with the -print0 option in find

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This is more efficient as it does not run  cp  multiple times   find -name   FooBar   -print0   xargs -0 cp -t   foo bar

User · Answer

For me  I was trying to do something a little different  I wanted to copy my  txt files into my tmp folder  The  txt filenames contain spaces and apostrophe characters  This worked on my Mac     find   -type f -name    txt    sed  s              g    sed  s      amp        xargs -I   cp -v      tmp

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If you are using Bash  you can convert stdout to an array of lines by mapfile   find     grep  FooBar     mapfile -t  cp    MAPFILE        foobar    The benefits are    It s built-in  so it s faster  Execute the command with all file names in one time  so it s faster  You can append other arguments to the file names  For cp  you can also   find   -name   FooBar   -exec cp -t   foobar --        however  some commands don t have such feature    The disadvantages    Maybe not scale well if there are too many file names   The limit  I don t know  but I had tested with 10 nbsp MB list file which includes 10000  file names with no problem  under Debian    Well    who knows if Bash is available on OS X

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This method works on Mac nbsp OS nbsp X nbsp v10 7 5  Lion    find     grep FooBar   xargs -I   cp      foo bar   I also tested the exact syntax you posted  That also worked fine on 10 7 5

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Just don t use xargs  It is a neat program but it doesn t go well with find when faced with non trivial cases   Here is a portable  POSIX  solution  i e  one that doesn t require find  xargs or cp GNU specific extensions   find   -name   FooBar   -exec sh -c  cp --        foo bar  sh        Note the ending   instead of the more usual     This solution    correctly handles files and directories with embedded spaces  newlines or whatever exotic characters  works on any Unix and Linux system  even those not providing the GNU toolkit  doesn t use xargs which is a nice and useful program  but requires too much tweaking and non standard features to properly handle find output  is also more efficient  read faster  than the accepted and most if not all of the other answers    Note also that despite what is stated in some other replies or comments quoting    is useless  unless you are using the exotic fishshell

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You might need to grep Foobar directory like   find   -name  file ext   grep  FooBar    xargs -i cp -p

User · Answer

With Bash  not POSIX  you can use process substitution to get the current line inside a variable  This enables you to use quotes to escape special characters   while read line   do cp   line    bar   done  lt   lt  find     grep foo

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For those who relies on commands  other than find  eg ls   find     grep  FooBar    tr   n   0   xargs -0 -I   cp        foo bar

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I played with this a little  started contemplating modifying xargs  and realised that for the kind of use case we re talking about here  a simple reimplementation in Python is a better idea   For one thing  having  80 lines of code for the whole thing means it is easy to figure out what is going on  and if different behaviour is required  you can just hack it into a new script in less time than it takes to get a reply on somewhere like Stack nbsp Overflow   See https   github com johnallsup jda-misc-scripts blob master yargs and https   github com johnallsup jda-misc-scripts blob master zargs py   With yargs as written  and Python 3 installed  you can type   find   grep  FooBar  yargs -l 203 cp --after   foo bar   to do the copying 203 files at a time   Here 203 is just a placeholder  of course  and using a strange number like 203 makes it clear that this number has no other significance    If you really want something faster and without the need for Python  take zargs and yargs as prototypes and rewrite in C   or C

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I created a small portable wrapper script called  xargsL  around  xargs  which addresses most of the problems   Contrary to xargs  xargsL accepts one pathname per line  The pathnames may contain any character except  obviously  newline or NUL bytes   No quoting is allowed or supported in the file list - your file names may contain all sorts of whitespace  backslashes  backticks  shell wildcard characters and the like - xargsL will process them as literal characters  no harm done   As an added bonus feature  xargsL will not run the command once if there is no input   Note the difference     true   xargs echo no data no data    true   xargsL echo no data   No output   Any arguments given to xargsL will be passed through to xargs   Here is the  xargsL  POSIX shell script        bin sh   Line-based version of  xargs   one pathname per line which may contain any   amount of whitespace except for newlines  with the added bonus feature that   it will not execute the command if the input file is empty      Version 2018 76 3     Copyright  c  2018 Guenther Brunthaler  All rights reserved      This script is free software    Distribution is permitted under the terms of the GPLv3   set -e trap  test      0    echo   0 failed    gt  amp  2  0  if IFS  read -r first then                           printf   s n    first                  cat             sed  s      amp  g    xargs   1       fi    Put the script into some directory in your  PATH and don t forget to    chmod  x xargsL  the script there to make it executable

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