Question

I’ve a shellscript, that I run from an NSTask, that I build dynamically. Everything works fine besides one thing:

If the filename contains a blank, it’s ignored by the find-command. I use it like that: ‘find -iname *.xxx’.

If the filename looks something like ‘aaa bbb.xxx’, than it’s not found.

Any help appreciated.

Regards,
Marcus

Answer 1

find does not care if your file names have spaces in them. That’s not your problem.

If you’re actually calling it as typed in your question (find -iname *.xxx), then the problem is that you need to quote the file name pattern to protect it from shell expansion: find -iname '*.xxx'. Note the quotes around the pattern; they’re essential.

Otherwise, the problem is very likely in how you’re handling the file names you’re getting back. For example, this won’t work:

for f in `find -iname '*.xxx'`; do
   echo "file: $f"
done

you’ll see that the backtick operator actually splits on spaces (or, $IFS, actually) and you get back two “files”: ‘aaa’ and ‘bbb.xxx’.