Question

I have a shell script with this line:

rm -rf `find something`

The problem is, if find returns a path with a space, rm of course interprets the space as a separator between two different paths and the command fails.

Is there a way to tell find to put quotes around the paths it returns or something else to fix this problem?

Answer 1

You can do:

find start_dir -name something -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -rf