Find and xargs are some of my favoritest things

[foxfirefey]

There is something imminently satisfying about using find and xargs to accomplish tasks on files in the folder tree:

find . -name "*.orig" | xargs rm

I use it to delete certain leftover files from editors or version control systems, or to change the permissions on all of a certain kind of file. I also use it to recursively grep in certain instances:

find . -name "*.pl" | xargs grep -i "OpenID"

Here are a couple of articles for those interested in learning more about this awesome combo:

Advanced techniques for using the find command
Unix Xargs Piping Toolkit Utility

Comments

[sophie]

This is a late reply, but it turns out that on GNU grep, at least, you can use the -H switch to grep as an alternative to using the /dev/null trick.