> >It is unfortunate that your choice of editor does not accept zero >terminated strings as filenames because then this would be easy using >grep's --null option. The problem therefore as I see it is a >deficiency in the editor capabilities. >
Oh, so all applications should be adjusted to account for bash/POSIX deficiencies? No. >This is probably not a an optimal solution because this is late night >time for me but this works: > > eval vi $(grep -l PATTERN * | sed 's/ /\\ /') > Yes, that works. But surely such a grotesque syntax is not really in the spirit of concise unix expressions. >I would suggest xargs but the input is not attached to the terminal in >that case. I think xargs has recently been enhanced to allow this but >it is not in most versions. But batch editing works well. > > grep --null -l PATTERN * | xargs -r0 sed --in-place 's/foo/bar/' > Again, one really wants to be able to use normal and concise expressions. >Although having spaces in filenames may be common in some cultures it >is definitely not in the Unix culture. Well, can I also say that unicode and grotesque multi-byte and multi-lingual character sets weren't in the unix culture either. But that is never an excuse. >Being able to work with file >names with spaces is definitely an afterthought. It is best to avoid >them. > > rename 's/ /_/g' * > No! Often filenames must match some scheme, and arbitarily renaming is not a good idea. For example, suppose they are target of html href. Suppose they are target of database reference. Excuse me - but really somebody should sit down and think very hard about this problem and come up with better working system, rather than just excuses. There is a specific challenge here. Something is sort-of broken and needs a good solution. Why is it that word splitting never makes a distinction between newlines and space? Because the output of grep -l, and ls, etc are clearly newline delimited. It is bash (and others) which quite deliberately reduce available information by converting all newlines and whitespace into a single space. Something simple like "vi $(^grep -l xx *)" would do. The ^ might work because it denotes line-orientated regex (and nobody uses it for pipes any more). The ball is quite clearly in bash's court. Regards Bahser _______________________________________________ Bug-bash mailing list Bug-bash@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-bash
