Question

I am trying to get the latest modification date in a directory tree.
This works fine in terminal:

find . ! -path "*.git*" -exec stat -f "%m" \{} \; | sort -n -r | head -1

But when I try this with NSTask I get

find: -exec: no terminating ";" or "+"

In the args array for NSTask which I am using, I escaped the backslashes:

NSArray *args = @[@".", 
                  @"!", 
                  @"-path", 
                  @"*.git*", 
                  @"-exec", 
                  @"stat", 
                  @"-f", 
                  @"%m", 
                  @"\\{}", 
                  @"\\;", 
                  @"|", 
                  @"sort", 
                  @"-n", 
                  @"-r", 
                  @"|", 
                  @"head", 
                  @"-1"];

So, what am I missing here? I also tried to remove the backslahes all together, but that gave me a “find: |: unknown primary or operator” error.

Answer 1

Thanks for the hints guys. I’ve split it up and get more response now. When running the command without backslashes & without the sort & head I do get results.

NSArray *args = @[@".", 
              @"!", 
              @"-path", 
              @"*.git*", 
              @"-exec", 
              @"stat", 
              @"-f", 
              @"%m", 
              @"{}", 
              @";"];

So it looks like NSTask should not be fed ‘|’ characters.
I’ll just so the sorting etc. in objc.