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Unix 'file' command has a -0 option to output a null character after a filename. This is supposedly good for using with 'cut'.
From man file:
-0, --print0
Output a null character ‘\0’ after the end of the filename. Nice
to cut(1) the output. This does not affect the separator which is
still printed.
(Note, on my Linux, the '-F' separator is NOT printed - which makes more sense to me.)
How can you use 'cut' to extract a filename from output of 'file'?
This is what I want to do:
find . "*" -type f | file -n0iNf - | cut -d<null> -f1
where <null> is the NUL character.
Well, that is what I am trying to do, what I want to do is get all file names from a directory tree that have a particular MIME type. I use a grep (not shown).
I want to handle all legal file names and not get stuck on file names with colons, for example, in their name. Hence, NUL would be excellent.
I guess non-cut solutions are fine too, but I hate to give up on a simple idea.
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On some keyboards, one can enter a null character by holding down Ctrl and pressing @ (on US layouts just Ctrl + 2 will often work, there is no need for ⇧ Shift to get the @ sign). In documentation, the null character is sometimes represented as a single-em-width symbol containing the letters "NUL".
In Linux, any special character can be literally inserted on the terminal by pressing Ctrl + v followed by the actual symbol. null is usually ^@ where ^ stands for Ctrl and @ for whatever combination on your keyboard layout that produces @ .
Using the -d switch we delete a character. A backslash followed by three 0's represents the null character. This just deletes these characters and writes the result to a new file.
The cut command is a command-line utility that allows you to cut out sections of a specified file or piped data and print the result to standard output. The command cuts parts of a line by field, delimiter, byte position, and character.
Just specify an empty delimiter:
cut -d '' -f1
(N.B.: The space between the -d and the '' is important, so that the -d and the empty string get passed as separate arguments; if you write -d'', then that will get passed as just -d, and then cut will think you're trying to use -f1 as the delimiter, which it will complain about, with an error message that "the delimiter must be a single character".)
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