How do I apply a shell command to many files in nested (and poorly escaped) subdirectories?

Question

I\'m trying to do something like the following:

for file in `find . *.foo`
do
somecommand $file
done

But the command isn\'t working because

Answer 1

xargs is your friend. You will also want to investigate the -0 (zero) option with it. find (with -print0) will help to produce the list. The Wikipedia page has some good examples.

Another useful reason to use xargs, is that if you have many files (dozens or more), xargs will split them up into individual calls to whatever xargs is then called upon to run (in the first wikipedia example, rm)