find with xargs

Question

cat fileNames.txt | xargs find . -name

I expect the above command to find the path of every
fileName in fileNames.txt, but this command produces no
output. Why?

Answer 1

A solution would be:

 xargs --max-args=1 find . -iname < fileNames.txt

Answer 2

Regular xargs call removes the newline characters, putting all the lines from input in single command line. You can however use the -I <pattern> option, where command will be called for each line of input, with <pattern> replaced with line contents.

Note also, that you should probably add the -print option to have the paths listed.

cat fileNames.txt | xargs -I {} find . -name {} -print

Answer 3

The -name option takes just a single argument. I'm not sure why you're not getting an error message. Try

sed 's/.*/-name "&"/' fileNames.txt | xargs find .

Answer 4

The answers so far have a hard time with filenames containing space, ' or ":

$ echo \'\ \" |  xargs -I {} find . -name {} -print
xargs: unmatched single quote; by default quotes are special to xargs unless you use the -0 option

$ echo \'\ \" | sed 's/.*/-name "&"/' | xargs find .
xargs: unmatched double quote; by default quotes are special to xargs unless you use the -0 option
find: missing argument to `-name'

If the files are made by users, you will experience funny named files. If you have GNU Parallel installed you can do:

cat fileNames.txt | parallel find . -name {} -print

Watch the intro video to learn more about GNU Parallel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ

GNU Parallel can be downloaded at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/ and has been reported to be working under Cygwin.