CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashgrepxargs
kikulikov
kikulikov

Reputation: 2583

xargs with grep passes an empty string

Where does grep: : No such file or directory come from when I pass a filename to grep with xargs?

⋊> ~/.v/bundle find . -name config | grep ".git" | xargs grep "url" {}                                                                                11:07:46
grep: : No such file or directory
./Dockerfile.vim/.git/config:   url = https://github.com/ekalinin/Dockerfile.vim.git
./nerdcommenter/.git/config:    url = https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdcommenter.git

Though there are no empty lines or something like that when I do 

⋊> ~/.v/bundle find . -name config | grep ".git"                                                                                                      11:08:30
./Dockerfile.vim/.git/config
./nerdcommenter/.git/config

And how to avoid it?

I know that I can skip the first line with something like awk 'NR>1' but would like to understand the cause of the issue.

Thank you.

P.S. I'm on Mac.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 508

Answers (2)

hek2mgl
hek2mgl

Reputation: 158020

Hard to say what is going wrong on your site. I've tried to reproduce the error, having .vim/bundle as well, but I couldn't reproduce it.

Anyhow, I suggest to simplify the command to:

find . -wholename '*/.git/config' -exec grep -H url {} +

xargs is not required any more since find supports the + syntax. This is at least true for GNU, BSD (MacOS) and busybox versions of find.

Upvotes: 2

Philippe Banwarth
Philippe Banwarth

Reputation: 17735

There is no need to add {} (unlike find -exec)

~/.v/bundle find . -name config | grep ".git" | xargs grep "url"

should work.

Or even better (just in case of file or directory names containing spaces or unusual characters) :

~/.v/bundle find . -name config -print0 | grep -z ".git" | xargs --null grep "url"

Upvotes: 1

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