I have a list of files that I can obtain using the UNIX 'find' command such as:
$ find . -name "*.txt"
foo/foo.txt
bar/bar.txt
How can I pass this output into a Python script like hello.py so I can parse it using Python's argparse library?
Thanks!
If you want just text output of find(1), then use a pipe:
~$ find . -name "*.txt" | python hello.py
If you are looking to pass list of files as arguments to the script, use xargs(1):
~$ find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 python hello.py
or use -exec option of find(1).
Use xargs:
find . -name "*.txt" | xargs python -c 'import sys; print sys.argv[1:]'
From man find:
-exec command ;
Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following
arguments to find are taken to be arguments to the command until
an argument consisting of `;' is encountered. The string `{}'
is replaced by the current file name being processed everywhere
it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just in arguments
where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these
constructions might need to be escaped (with a `\') or quoted to
protect them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES sec‐
tion for examples of the use of the -exec option. The specified
command is run once for each matched file. The command is exe‐
cuted in the starting directory. There are unavoidable secu‐
rity problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should
use the -execdir option instead.
-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on
the selected files, but the command line is built by appending
each selected file name at the end; the total number of invoca‐
tions of the command will be much less than the number of
matched files. The command line is built in much the same way
that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of `{}'
is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the
starting directory.
So you can do
find . -name "*.txt" -exec python myscript.py {} +
This helps, if you need to pass arguments after the list of arguments from the find output:
$ python hello.py `find . -name "*.txt"`
I used it to concat pdf files into another one:
$ pdfunite `find . -name "*.pdf" | sort` all.pdf
