prevent space from splitting filenames using backticks

Question

Using find to select files to pass to another command using backticks/backquotes, I've noted that filenames that contain spaces will be split, and therfore not found.

Is it possible to avoid this behaviour? The command I issued looks like this

wc `find . -name '*.txt'`

but for example when there is a file named a b c.txt in directory x it reports

$ wc `find . -name '*.txt'` wc: ./x/a: No such file or directory wc: b: No such file or directory wc: c.txt: No such file or directory

When used with multiple files wc will show the output of each file, and a final summary line with the totals of all files. that's why I want to execute wc once.

I tried escaping spaces with sed, but wc produces the same output (splits filenames with spaces).

wc `find . -name '*.txt' | sed 's/ /\\\ /pg'`

Barmar · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-01 20:57:53Z

1

Use the -print0 option to find and the corresponding -0 option to xargs:

find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 wc

You can also use the -exec option to find:

find . -name '*.txt' -exec wc {} +

answered Jun 1, 2015 at 20:57

Barmar

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1 Comment

Barmar Over a year ago

That's the exact opposite of what xargs normally does. It was created to batch the calls up into optimal groups.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:51:07Z

from this very similar question (should I flag my question as a duplicate?) I found another answer to this using bash's ** expansion:

wc **/*.txt

for this to work I had to

shopt -s globstar

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