How can I direct a pipe input to ls command?

When I type something like:

find . -name *foo* | ls -lah

it returns the same result as a plain ls command, as though it had no input.

However:

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

works well, but only when the find command has results.

Is it possible to pipe to ls ?

Solution 1:

You can use -exec with find command.

find . -name '*foo*' -exec ls -lah {} \;

Solution 2:

find . -name *foo* | xargs -r ls -lah

That should work.

Solution 3:

Try this:

find  . -name *.bak -ls

Solution 4:

This works with filenames with spaces or unusual characters, and ls can sort all the files:

find . -name *foo* -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lah

-print0 means that filenames such as file foo 1 will get output from find followed by null. The "-0" argument to xargs tells it to expect this sort of input, so filenames with spaces get piped to the ls command correctly.

The xargs construction is in some ways better than find etc -exec ls {} + because all the filenames get sent to ls at once, so if you want to sort them all by timestamp (using ls), something like this works:

find . -iname *pdf -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ltr

On a NetBSD system, "-printx" is also an option (this seems a useful argument to me, but whatever, we have xargs -0 and it's okay):

find . -name *foo* -printx | xargs ls -lah` # not for Ubuntu