Re: find in conjuction with grep

From: Kevin Wang (rightsock_at_gmail.com)
Date: 08/12/04

  • Next message: Bill Tetens: "Re: Cannot install FC2" 
    Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 14:51:42 -0700
To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>

    two issues - security and performance. performance was covered
    already. explicitly, xargs can be 100x or more faster.

    The security issue I don't remember being explicitly covered.

    find . -exec grep "string" {}

    what happens when you have a filename with a space in it?
    quotes?
    double quotes?

    xargs suffers from the same issues, that's why there's the -print0 arg
    for find and -0 arg for xargs - \0 terminated strings are guaranteed,
    as nulls are one of the only invalid filename characters.

    sure, 99% of the time it isn't a problem, but when you're writing
    scripts that run as root that are running on a multi user system
    (think thousands of college students with too much time on their hands
    just wanting to break in and read everyone else's email)

       - Kevin

    On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 22:10:37 +0200, Alexander Dalloz
    <alexander.dalloz@uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:
    > Am Do, den 12.08.2004 schrieb Lew Bloch um 21:08:
    >
    > > >>I've been using
    > > >>> find . -exec grep "phrase I want" {} \;
    > > >
    > > > Not the best way. Using -exec is problematic.
    > >
    > > How exactly is the -exec directive problematic?
    > >
    > > I use "find ... -exec grep ..." a lot. I also use the "find ... | xargs
    > > grep ..." a lot.
    >
    > Please see the thread discussion. It is already answered.
    >
    > Alexander
    >
    > --
    > Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG key 1024D/ED695653 1999-07-13
    > Fedora GNU/Linux Core 2 (Tettnang) kernel 2.6.7-1.494.2.2smp
    > Serendipity 22:09:55 up 8 days, 15:37, load average: 1.27, 1.23, 1.27
    >
    >
    > 

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