[SOLVED] system wide elf compression script using find, file, and upx

system wide elf compression script using find, file, and upx

I'm working on my first script, and it is to compress all elf executables on a system.

  find / * -executable -type f -exec file '{}' \; | grep ELF | sed -e "s/[:].*//" |     
  upx --best --ultra-brute

upx is not responding to sent files

Solution

Not sure if you're going a safe way for your system (don't you want to filter at least shared libs?), but I would suggest:

find / -executable -type f | xargs file |\
grep ELF | cut -d: -f1 | xargs upx --best --ultra-brute

If you have blanks in file names

find / -executable -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file |\
grep ELF | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -0 upx --best --ultra-brute

but is is likely you will bump into a shell limit (xargs: argument line too long)

One workaround would be to use a loop:

find / -executable -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file |\
grep ELF | cut -d: -f1 |\
while read f 
do
   upx --best --ultra-brute "$f"
done