I'm using the command below to generate a list of files and their m5sum. The problem is that some of the files or folders have spaces in the name. How would I handle those?
find -type f -name \* | xargs md5sum
Try:
find . -type f -exec md5sum {} +
With this command, find will run md5sum on the files that it finds.
MacOS: According to the MacOS find man page, find on a Mac does not support the + option. Instead, the somewhat less efficient (see note 3 below) form is required:
find . -type f -exec md5sum {} \;
Notes:
-name \* tells find to search for all files. Since this is the default, it is not necessary to specify it.
It is common for modern file names to have spaces in their names. In fact, they can even have newlines in their names. Consequently, xargs is generally not safe to use unless one uses the -0 or --null options to tell it to use NUL-separated input. This can be combined with find's -print0 which tells find to generate NUL-separated output. Since, however, -exec can do most things that xargs can do and is safe to use with difficult file names, the -exec form is usually preferred.
If we had used the form -exec md5sum {} \;, then find would run md5sum once for each file found. The form -exec md5sum {} +, by contrast, will place many file names on the command line. This greatly reduces the number of processes that have to be started.
Sample output from the above command looks like:
$ find . -type f -exec md5sum {} +
e75632e8a11db7513c2a9f25cb6c9627 ./file1
004dedba9b67f3a93924db548fd4d6ef ./file2
48645402a2cf6ada3548ad69d8d906db ./dir1/file1
6a182d8fe659c067897be7fde72903ea ./dir1/file2