Getting xargs: unterminated quote when trying to find text in files

I'm using Mac 10.9.5 with bash shell. I'm trying to search for instances of text within a group of files, but for some reason, in one particular directory, I get this bizarre "Unterminated quote" error ...

Daves-MacBook-Pro:sbadmin davea$ find src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/ -name "*" | xargs grep 'addresses' > /tmp/addr
xargs: unterminated quote

Any ideas how to solve this?

1 Answer

That happens because one of the filenames contains a quote and is passed to xargs as-is. That means xargs is run like xargs grep 'addresses' > /tmp/addr some file'name — and there is an unterminated ' here.

The actual problem is that you're using find | xargs. That's something you really don't want to do, even if it looks tempting.

There are a few solutions to this problem:

1. Use the -print0 option for find and -0 for xargs:

   find src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/ -name "*" -print0 | xargs -0 grep 'addresses' > /tmp/addr

   This is the recommended way to pipe from find to xargs because it can deal with any filename, even those containing newlines.

   Note that using -name "*" is superfluous. You should also consider using -type f to filter only files. And you could, of course, call a program from within find, too:

   find … -type f -exec grep 'addresses' {} \; > /tmp/addr

   But this is also not recommended. See the second option:

2. Use a more efficient approach altogether – recursive greping with the -r option:

   grep -r 'addresses' src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/ > /tmp/addr