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linuxxargs
JB_User
JB_User

Reputation: 3267

I'm using xargs, but the argument list is too long

I'm using Linux. I have a directory tree with over 100,000 files that originated on a MS Windows system. Some of the files have spaces in their names. I want to convert those files to unix. I ran this command

find . -type f | xargs -0 dos2unix

And received this error message

xargs: argument line too long

How can I fix this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1465

Answers (2)

stark
stark

Reputation: 13189

You don't need xargs here, you can do

find . -type f -exec dos2unix '{}' +

Upvotes: 2

acran
acran

Reputation: 8963

If you want to use xargs with -0 to prevent issues with spaces/special characters in file names you must also use -print0 with find so it will delimit its output with null bytes:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 dos2unix

Upvotes: 4

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