A friend of mine was asking how to append a string to files contained in a directory structure of unknown depth. I dug around a little bit and found this gem.

Eric has been having several difficult issues building KDE 4-point-something on Funtoo (a Gentoo fork) and it occurred to him that it might be possible to add a specific use flag to every IUSE contained within the build. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the package directory structure, it would prove tiresome attempting to append the same string to each file. Besides, that’s what scripting is all about, isn’t it?

Here’s one possible solution:

find . -type f -name 'IUSE' -exec sh -c 'echo "exceptions" >> {}' \;

For a more secure solution, use -execdir:

find . -type f -name 'IUSE' -execdir sh -c 'echo "exceptions" >> {}' \;

If that syntax frightens you, for loop constructs are also a possibility:

for file in `find . -type f -name 'IUSE'` ; do echo "exceptions" >> $i ; done

If you know of others, share them!