Not using `-iname`, using `-print0` and being surprised to see NULs appearing, the weird pipe + xargs instead of just `-exec`, using some hyper-convoluted way of replacing the NULs instead of just man find... that's probably not the best advertisement for “decades of consulting experience ”.

Hell, I put myself in that camp and I am perfectly capable of hacks, cludge, and mistakes.

Be compassionate.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people woud laugh at a JS “thought leader” who would write a whole post on how he just discovered this weird number i whose square is negative and how smart he was to have found the wikipedia page about it.

I think that part makes sense though as it's simply the older idiom before -exec existed. (That's the reason why both find and xargs have specific flags related to /0-delimited filenames that are basically counterparts to each other)

Also, shouldn't the two be roughly equal in efficiency? To my knowledge, xargs (without -i) does the same command aggregation that -exec ... + does.

So the number of "grep" processes spawned by the two commands should be roughly the same, I think.

But instead of dwelling on prejudices I decided to try my own solution. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42163286

This quote is from George Bernard Shaw, but it's from a character from a play he wrote in 1903, "Man and Superman". The character is a descendent of Don Juan, a firebrand, but instead of being crazy about seducing women, he's crazy about revolution and anarchy. GBS explains exactly what he was thinking when he wrote this, in the preface, at extreme length:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3328/pg3328-images.html

The preface is actually a letter to the friend who inspired the play. Some quotes:

> There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my comedy ...

> When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a selected class bred by political marriages.

> I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way.

> I have only made my Don Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his pamphlet in full by way of appendix.

So the quote is from that appendix, Maxims for Revolutionists.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107-images.ht...

> He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

There's at least one other well known quote there:

> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Did GBS really mean this stuff? Kinda, but he's obviously being playful, because he got an overblown and ridiculous comedy revolutionary character to say it for him, in a work of fiction.

So with all due respect to the author, I wonder if he was just using -print0 after rote-learning it as part of the find command (or having had some tutor implore "ALWAYS use -print0"), without knowing what it does.

The "right" answer is to switch to using -print rather than -print0

-print delimits the values with a newline character (\n) -print0 delimits the values with a null character (\0)

Now, it does fail with filenames that have newlines in them, but who would do such a thing!

If your server code runs this on untrusted input (files uploaded by users or whatever), the answer will be: Someone trying to crack your system.

I would likely use -exec:

   $ mkdir dir.py
   $ echo blah >> blah.py
   $ find . -type f -name "*.py" -exec grep -i BLAH {} \;
   blah
   $

    find . -name '*.py' -type f -exec grep -il {} +

In almost all cases I just want something simple, like finding a file somewhere on disk with based on a partial filename.

Now there are probably some nice, more modern tools made for this, but usually when I need it it's on some system where they're not present and I can't just install random stuff from the interwebs. So find it is...

I just feel it would be nice if finding a file didn't feel like playing Tomb Raider.

    $ grep '[][]' </dev/null
    $ rg '[][]' </dev/null
    rg: regex parse error:
        (?:[][])
             ^^
    error: unclosed character class
    $

And yeah, why would you ASCII NUL terminate each filename output by `find` by using `-print0`? I mean, who adds quotes, backslashes or whitespace to their Python source file names?

find . -name '*.py' -iname '*pattern*'

for filenames that have content matching pattern, no need for find:

grep -r --include '*.py' -l -i pattern .

no need for pipes, xargs, etc.

Using -print0 is necessary if you have filenames containing LF chars. Otherwise just use -print and grep and everything should be fine.

Now how do we handle NUL separated records? That required a bit of thinking, the Unix world is based so much on lines. Without extensive testing the following awk program seems to work:

    BEGIN       { RS = "\0" }
    $0 ~ regexp

    awk -v 'regexp=what I search for'

    awk -v "regexp=$1"