On: Resolving a mysterious problem with find

[usr1106]

The first line they start with is utter nonsense. find -print0 will not produce lines, but records (or strings) separated by NUL. But grep is a tool working with lines (separated by LF). No mystery that it cannot work.

Using -print0 is necessary if you have filenames containing LF chars. Otherwise just use -print and grep and everything should be fine.

Now how do we handle NUL separated records? That required a bit of thinking, the Unix world is based so much on lines. Without extensive testing the following awk program seems to work:

    BEGIN       { RS = "\0" }
    $0 ~ regexp

Call with

    awk -v 'regexp=what I search for'

In their script that would be

    awk -v "regexp=$1"

Edit: Credits for s/whitespace/LF chars/ go to user hnfong

[hnfong → usr1106]

When grepping for filenames print0 is needed only when the files have new lines in them. (Which is quite degenerate.) grep works fine with spaces and tabs in the stdin

[usr1106 → hnfong]

Thanks! Updated.