Re: getting 'grepped' files from file list

[Matthew Woehlke]

Bob Proulx wrote:
> Uhm, well, hmm...  Once you start worring about whitespace in
> filenames handling spaces but not handling newlines just doesn't feel
> right.  Yes that will handle spaces but then not files with newlines
> in them.  If effort is going to be put in there to handle one then the
> other is not too far away using zero terminated strings.

Except... how many people have file names with '\n' in them? How many 
have files with ' ' in them? :-)

Given that most any GUI makes it easy to put ' ' in a file name (even 
without thinking about what problems it might cause), such files are 
fairly popular. Also it is natural to name a file e.g. 'My Christmas 
List.odt'. Not so much to put '\n' in a file name. (And, come to think 
of it, I bet most GUI's would have problems coping with file names 
containing '\n's.)

I understand the ivory tower approach, but really, what percentage of 
users have files with ' ' in their names, and how does it compare to the 
percentage of users with file names containing '\n'? I bet the former is 
pretty close to 100%, and the latter pretty close to 0.

Practically speaking, using 'xargs -d \\n' will work 99.9999% of the time.

--
Matthew
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