Thanks for the replies everyone. Les, you were right about meta-characters. The file name contains "double-quotes" (bad log4j config) and that's causing the problem. e.g. /opt/apps/tomcat/logs/apache.log\".-2010-09-24\" The ls command works fine after escaping double quotes: \" . My objective was to delete files matching find-pattern using 'xargs rm'. I wanted to do 'ls' before I delete these files permanently. I guess I can use 'find -delete' action instead which is working fine. -- neubyr. On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 7:59 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On 2/23/11 10:54 PM, neubyr wrote: >> Howdy, >> >> I am getting some errors with find and ls command - such that find is >> able to see a file whereas ls says the file doesn't exist. Initially I >> was trying find and ls together as: >> # find ./ -type f -mtime +15 | xargs ls >> >> Similar behavior is seen even when I execute both commands separately. >> Any thoughts on what might be wrong here? > > Can you give an example of a path that find returns and the output of > ls -l 'that_path_in_quotes' > My first guess is that you have shell metacharacters (like spaces) in the file > or directory names that the shell parses/expands if you don't quote them. Using > the GNU --print0 extension to find and the matching -0 option to xargs might fix it. > > -- > Les Mikesell > lesmikesell at gmail.com > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >