xargs: unmatched single quote

OK… Here is a short tip that might help others in the same situation: here i was running a simple find/grep command that I have always used to search for files matching some string; this was something simple like:

find . -type f | xargs grep string
And bum… After a while the command failed with the error: “xargs: unmatched single quote“. This happened because one of the files returned by the find command had a quote character inside its file name. xargs was not able to distinguish between the quote part of the file name and the quote used to quote names.

If you encounter a similar problems the solutions is to add -printf ‘”%p”\n’ to the find command line that will enclose all file names into double quotes:
find . -type f -printf '"%p"\n' | xargs grep string
if your find command does not have the -printf operand, you can try to use the -print0 operand and the command will look like:
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep string
-M.

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4 Responses to “xargs: unmatched single quote”

1
Anil
24th November 2007, 04:10
Hi Marius,

Thanks for the tip. Another tip to search a string inside the search results,

====
find . -type f -exec grep string {} \;
====

Thanks
Anil
2
thc2cat
24th November 2007, 18:18
recursive grep is nice too !

grep -R string .
3
HoverHell
10th January 2008, 06:50
find . -type f | xargs -d ‘\n’ grep string
4
christian
26th December 2008, 21:24
been working on tar piping my whole music stash. accidentally created a bunch of ‘*.mp3.gz’ so, to undo that I ran your command

find . -name ‘*.gz’ -type f -printf ‘”%p”\n’ | xargs rm -f

It deleted all the .gz files no problem .. and it deleted my mp3s!!!!!!

I stopped it before it destroyed my entire stash (I was wondering why it took so long and cntrl-c)

Now I will have to try to get data from an alternative store