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When I type sth. like that

find . -name *foo* | ls -lah

it gives me a ls-output of 'pwd' like I had no file(s) given to 'ls'.

To simply use

ls -lah $( find . -name *foo* )

works well (when the 'find' command has results).

Is it possible to pipe to 'ls' ?

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You can use -exec with find command.

find . -name '*foo*' -exec ls -lah {} \;
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Thank you for your solution. There is no pipe but it's an elegant method. If there aren't found any results with 'find' it doesn't display anything (what is in fact good). – Lasall May 21 '11 at 7:22
2  
A slightly better way: find . -name '*foo*' -exec ls -lah {} + – jlliagre May 22 '11 at 3:35
up vote 4 down vote 
find . -name *foo* | xargs ls -lah

that should work

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Thank you for that solution. But how can I deal with whitespaces? – Lasall May 21 '11 at 6:59
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@Lasall the preferred way is to use find's -exec + (or -exec \;). xargs is only safe to use with the -0 option, which means that you have to tell whatever command you pipe to xargs to delimit the items with NULL-bytes (\0). With find you can do that with -print0. xargs's -0 and find's -print0 are not standard, but -exec is, so if portability is ever an issue, use find with -exec. – geirha May 26 '11 at 23:29
@geirha: Thank you for your exact explanation. – Lasall May 27 '11 at 14:06

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