Bdtjtk

At the BASH prompt I can find files then append xargs to do further stuff. e.g. find ... | xargs rm {}

However, sometimes there is a manual intermediate step: I use fzf to refine the find results.

I would like to use this filtered list of files to create an incomplete xargs command at the terminal.

For example, if my find command produces
file1 file2 file3, and my fzf narrows this down to file2 file3, I would like the script to create an incomplete line at the terminal like this:

file2 file3 |xargs -0 --other-standard-options

but i don't want the command to flush (I don't know what the correct term is) as if I had pressed enter. I want to be able to complete the command myself (e.g. rm {}), after seeing the list of files printed on the line.

The find command will need to use the print0 option.

I suppose the script would look something like this:

find . | fzf -m | *echo incomplete xargs command*.

the echo -n command is not what I want: it still passes the command to BASH shell.

Maybe there is a better way of using find, then manually checking and filtering, then executing a command like rm or mv, and if so, that would be an acceptable answer.

The number of files I need to be able to deal with after the filtering is small (<100).

So it looks like fzf has some evn settings that can be used to filter the set of data that comes back. There is also options env as well. I would take a look at the following evn variables:
FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND and FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS.

FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND will allow you to use a different command to filter down your file set. Check out the following here

Meaning you may not need to use find and pipe that to the fzf command. You could just start with the fzf command itself and set the proper evn variable.

To use the interactive mode to remove and review files on the same line you could do something like the following.

find . -type f -name '*test*' | fzf -m | xargs rm

for f in $(find . -type f -name '*test*' | fzf -m); do 

   read -p ".... ${f} Enter command to insert on the dots "

   echo "$REPLY ${f}"

   $REPLY "${f}"

done

The following seems to work, leaving the user to complete the command at the prompt:

out=$(find . |fzf -m )

prefix="echo  ";

suffix="| xargs  ";

files="$(echo "${out}" | sed -e 's:^.:".:g' -e 's:$:":g'|tr 'n' ' ' )";

cmd="${prefix}${files}${suffix}" ;

read -e -i "$cmd"; eval "$REPLY";

Explanation: fzf outputs filenames which I wrap in double quotes for the sake of safety; the terminal command I want to create looks like this:

echo "file1" "file2" "file3"|xargs ....

All the real credit goes to @meuh here