On Thu, 22 Jun 2006, William L. Maltby wrote:
On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 07:21 -0500, Robert wrote:
Can someone explain why this: find . -depth -print0 | cpio --null -pmd /tmp/test will copy all files in and below the current directory -and- this: find . -depth -print | grep -v .iso$ | wc -l will count all the non-iso files -and- this: find . -depth -print | grep .iso$ | wc -l will count *only* the iso files -but- this: find . -depth -print0 | grep -v .iso$ | cpio --null -pmd /tmp/test doesn't copy *anything*? Any suggestions for a work-around would also be most welcome.
Replace the print0 with print. If you need to know why, redirect your find print0 output to a file & then do an od -c on it.
Hint: cpio expects one entry per line (in spite of what it did for you) and grep operates on lines of input. If it's not clear after doing the od -c, call again. :-)
cpio, like xargs, can accept an argument list terminated by a null character rather than whitespace. That what the OP was doing with the --null switch (aka -0, also possible with xargs). It's very helpful with unpredictable filenames.
-- Paul Heinlein heinlein@madboa.com