Re: QSHELL question for find command

["Adam Driver" <Adam.Driver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Scott,

That actually makes sense now. I was tring to change down to the directory
and just do find * because I thought perhaps the number of directories in
the path was causing the too many arguments error, but now I see how it
works. I only know a little Unix (just enough to be dangerous really!).

I think the person doing this probably knows even a little bit less than me
and was just playing with the find command. Personally I would have just
done an ls in this case, but it's good to try new things!

I tried the command with find /dir1/dir/dir3/dir4/ (ie, without the
wildcard), and it works perfectly.

We're about to start looking after some AIX partitions on an i5, so I might
paste Joe's quote "The shell expands everything. The shell expands
everything. The shell expands everything (unless it's in quotes).." on the
wall.

Many thanks for your help

Adam Driver
Technical Consultant
Kaz Technology Services
www.kaz-group.com
Phone: +61 2 9844 0386
Fax: +61 2 9281 5261


date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 02:53:17 -0600 (CST)
from: Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: QSHELL question for find command


> On one system the command
> find /dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/* returns a list of files in the last directory
> in the path.

The * character is interpreted by QShell, not by the FIND utility.  QShell
will expand the wildcard into a list of filenames, and pass that list of
filenames to the FIND utility instead.

So if I have a directory containing files named file1.txt file2.txt and
file3.txt and I say "find /mydir/*" Qshell will expand the command line to
read "find /mydir/file1.txt /mydir/file2.txt /mydir/file3.txt" and then it
will run find with those 3 parameters.  ("Arguments" is another name for
parameters)

> On the other system the same command returns
> qsh: 001-0085 Too many arguments specified on command.

There's a limit to how many arguments can be specified for a given
command.  So, if there are 800 files in a directory, and you type "find
/mydir/*" then it creates a really long command with all of those 800
files.  If that's more files than are allowed, you'll get the "too many
arguments" error.

>
> Even if I cd into the end directory and just do find * I still get the
same
> result

Doing a CD to the directory and "find *" should result in the exact same
number of files as "find /thedir/*" does.  I don't understand your point
here.

> so I'm assuming there is some sort of command default coming into
> play? Even after uninstalling QSHELL and restoring the licensed program
> from the system that does work I still get the same result. Both systems
> are at V5R2 with the same cume and group levels.

Shrug...  it's really easy to fix, don't use * in the find command.  It
really doesn't make sense there anyway.  The first argument to find should
be the name of a directory, not a list of files in that directory!

In other words, do it like this:

      find /dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4

That will list all of the files in dir4 and any subdirectories below dir4.
You don't need the * character.

If you need to subset the list of files by filename, you should use the
-name switch to do that.  If you use a wildcard in that, make sure you put
it in single quotes so that it'll be interpreted by FIND instead of by
QShell.

For example, DON'T do the following:

      find /mydir -name *.txt

because QShell will expand *.txt into a list of files, and what the FIND
utility will actually see will be the following:

      find /mydir -name file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

That's a problem, because find will think that "file2.txt" is another
switch that you're wanting to pass to it, and it doesn't know how to deal
with a swtich called "file2.txt" so it will return an error.

On the other hand, DO do it this way:

     find /mydir -name '*.txt'

The single quotes tell QShell not to do any special processing for the
characters in the quotes.  That way, the FIND utilty will actually receive
the characters '*.txt' as the argument to the -name switch, and will know
how to deal with it.

This is true of any Unix shell, and is not specific to QShell.