Strange BASH behavious

[funkytwig]

Hi, in a lot of the bash scripts I do I load the command I want to run, echo it to a logfile and run it. This has worked fine up to now but I am having a problem with a find -exec. Here is the code

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find_cmd="find -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "
find_cmd+='"'
find_cmd+="$backup_name*_${prev_back_type}_*"
find_cmd+='"'
find_cmd+=" -cmin +$cmin -print -exec rm -r {} \;"

echo $find_cmd

$find_cmd

And here is what I get when I run it:

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find -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "bash*_H_*" -cmin +60 -print -exec rm -r {} \;
find: missing argument to `-exec'

Aon the strange thing, if I simply cut and paste 'find -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "bash*_H_*" -cmin +60 -print -exec rm -r {} \;' to the shell it works fine.

[kiyop]

Maybe you can do as follows, although I do not know the reason:

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bash -c "$find_cmd"

[HarborView]

The reason is there are bugs in Bash when you have characters like [ or { or \ or / in a string.

By definition these should not happen but they do. Here is an example from a program I was working on yesterday. The project has a folder for a batch of temporary files. Each time the program is run the folder has to be cleaned out. (No, the system /tmp will not work for this purpose.)

Note: Because these are errors in the language we should always say which version it is. I am using Bash 4.2(37).

Anyway, we enter my program after the location of the temporary folder has is stored in a variable named $temp:

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  temp=$BasePath"/.temp"
  rm $temp"/*"

That is rejected wth an error message. But it works in the command line.

After too much time I finally gave it this syntax:

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  temp=$BasePath"/.temp"
  tempfiles=$temp"/*"
  rm $tempfiles

That works OK.

(Disclosure: Actually the program has rm -f $tempfiles so it won't annoy me with an error message that the folder is already empty. I simplified to illustrate. The above examples work the same with or without the -f option.)

Possibly changing the order of your arguments to }{\; would make a difference.