To answer Jake's question, xargs does nothing more than create an argument list for a command. xargs ls -l basically will take the piped in input and use that as command line arguments to ls -l Go with the file list if possible unles you know you aren' going to get a huge argument list is my habit . Esp. since you said your grep command was nearing about 200 lines of output. I use the find and xargs for quick and dirty solutions (usually one time solutions). I'm a little more wary of using it for ongoing system scripts. Just my thing I guess. For ow's thing, those errors are strange . I hadn't seen those before . My guess is that you have a file somewhere with a single quote in it. Do the find on its own and see if that's the case. == Original Message Below == I Get.. [ow_mh@hmweb ow_mh]$ find . -type f -print | xargs xargs: unmatched single quote [ow_mh@hmweb ow_mh]$ find . -type f -print | xargs ls -l xargs: unmatched single quote [ow_mh@hmweb ow_mh]$ find . -type f -print | xargs 'ls -l' xargs: unmatched single quote [ow_mh@hmweb ow_mh]$ find . -type f -print | xargs "ls -l" xargs: unmatched single quote [ow_mh@hmweb ow_mh]$ find . -type f -print | xargs du -sk xargs: unmatched single quote so.. no matter what I try.. -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
