[Techtalk] real life kewl text-processing and regexps samples wanted

[Carla Schroder]

On Friday 09 January 2004 7:14 pm, Elena Bevell wrote:
> 
> I like this recursive grep that I found somewhere:
> 
> find  . -type f -exec grep "thing-to-find" {} \;
> 
> note that there is no space between the two braces
> and no space between the backslash and the semicolon,
> but there is a space between the second brace and the backslash.
> 
> Can someone explain the spaces and why this works?
> 

 Oo oo, me! The {} \; is a 'find' option. It executes any command, after 
'find' does its finding bit. The curly braces represent the file being 
operated on. Backslash escapes the semi-colon, which marks the end of the 
command string. 

You can replace -exec with -ok, and this prompts you at every step for 
verification. -v of course is verbose. So let's say you were doing a big mass 
chowning:

# find / -uid 750 -ok chown -v  800 {} \;

This will ask for confirmation on every file it finds, with much chatter.
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla Schroder
www.tuxcomputing.com
this message brought to you
by Libranet 2.8 and Kmail
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~