On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 03:04:06PM +0530, Pankaj Jangid wrote:
> I tried to print ~40 pages using the following combination of commands:
>
> find . -name "pref***.pdf" | xargs lp
>
> The result was that a couple of pages were missed.
That command is fundamentally broken. It will fail if any of the
matching filenames contain whitespace, single quotes or double quotes.
A correct version would be:
find . -name "pref*.pdf" -exec lp {} +
That's the preferred one. If you're really old-fashioned and just cannot
live without xargs, the first thing you must realize is that POSIX xargs
is fundamentally incapable of doing this correctly. GNU xargs has a -0
extension, though, which makes it possible:
find . -name "pref*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 lp
That one is acceptable, albeit longer, less efficient and less portable.
