👀 Views: 23 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-05-31

bash find xargs

I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I've encountered a strange issue with I've been working on this all day and I'm experimenting with I'm trying to delete files that match a specific pattern in a directory and its subdirectories using a bash script... I thought this command would work: ```bash find /path/to/dir -name '*.log' | xargs rm ``` However, I'm working with an scenario where it's throwing an behavior for some files, specifically: `rm: want to remove 'file.log': No such file or directory`. I checked the files, and they do exist. I also tried using `find` with the `-exec` flag like so: ```bash find /path/to/dir -name '*.log' -exec rm {} \; ``` This seems to work correctly, but I’m curious why the `xargs` method fails in this scenario. I suspect it might be due to spaces in the filenames or perhaps some special characters, but I’m not sure how to handle that. I've also verified that there are no symbolic links causing issues by running `find` with `-type f`. I'm using bash version 5.0 on Ubuntu 20.04. Any insights into why `xargs` doesn't work here and how to properly use it would be greatly appreciated! I also want to know if there’s a better practice when it comes to removing files with `find` in scripts, especially regarding handling filenames safely. How would you solve this? What would be the recommended way to handle this? This is for a desktop app running on Ubuntu 20.04. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I appreciate any insights! This is happening in both development and production on macOS. Am I missing something obvious?