xargs verses exec

It has come time to switch to xargs instead of exec. I have found two issues with xargs, but I'll only ask one now.

Say I change to ORACLE BASE and do a find on 'all the subdirectories' piping through xargs, but... there are no files that meet the criteria -- say the extension is ".abc".

cd ${ORACLE_BASE}
find */cdump -name "*.abc" -type f -mtime +40 -print | xargs ls -ltr

Then, the find command comes back with the contents of the ${ORACLE_BASE} directory.

If I replace "ls -ltr" with "rm", I can see that this could be dangerous. (Maybe removing something not intended).

I know there are lots of you that use this command. Are there any comments or suggestions?

Joel Patterson
Database Administrator
904 727-2546

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