ugh.book

168 csh, pipes, and find

...

Great. The shell thinks curly brackets are expendable.

% find. -name ’*.el’ -exec echo test -f ’{}’c \;

test -f {}c

test -f {}c

test -f {}c

test -f {}c

...

Huh? Maybe I’m misremembering, and {} isn’t really the magic

“substitute this file name” token that find uses. Or maybe...

% find. -name ’*.el’ \

-exec echo test -f ’{}’ c \;

test -f ./bytecomp/bytecomp-runtime.el c

test -f ./bytecomp/disass.el c

test -f ./bytecomp/bytecomp.el c

test -f ./bytecomp/byte-optimize.el c

...

Oh, great. Now what. Let’s see, I could use “sed...”

Now at this point I should have remembered that profound truism:

“Some people, when confronted with a Unix problem, think ‘I know,

I’ll use sed.’ Now they have two problems.”

Five tries and two searches through the sed man page later, I had

come up with:

% echo foo.el | sed ’s/$/c/’

foo.elc

and then:

% find. -name ’*.el’ \

-exec echo test -f `echo ’{}’ \

| sed ’s/$/c/’` \;

test -f c

test -f c

test -f c

...

OK, let’s run through the rest of the shell-quoting permutations until

we find one that works.