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ahoffer
Asked: 2019-05-09 07:22:33 +0800 CST

find . -name "documentation.html" | xargs xdg-open

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The (bash) command find . -name "documentation.html" | xargs xdg-open finds a file and passes its path to xdg-open, but xdg-open errors out:

xdg-open: unexpected argument './distribution/docs/target/docs/html/documentation.html'

The command find . -name "documentation.html" -exec xdg-open {} + results in the same error

Why? Is find passing the quote character to xdg-open? I can't figure it out.

bash xdg

1 Answers

  1. This might be caused by extra characters piped into xargs or errors (i.e. permission denied for certain dirs).

    If you want to pass only one file to xargs you can try this:

    find -type f -name "documentation.html" 2> /dev/null | head -n 1 | xargs -n 1 xdg-open

    or

    xdg-open `find -type f -name "examples.desktop" 2> /dev/null`

    Another solution will be while loop:

    find -type f -name "examples.desktop" 2> /dev/null | while read -r FILE ; do xdg-open "$FILE" ; done
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