¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Problem statement: find all base/mongo occurrences in kustomization.yaml files in the codebase.

My favorite approach:

% fd kustomization.yaml | ifne xargs -n 1 ack "base/mongo" -l
[...]
ack: scaffolding/cookiecutter/base/{{: No such file or directory
ack: cookiecutter.app_name: No such file or directory
ack: }}/kustomization.yaml: No such file or directory

But it looks horrible!

The problem is that there is a file named as follows:

scaffolding/cookiecutter/base/{{ cookiecutter.app_name }}/kustomization.yaml

…more specifically, the spaces are the problem. It’s easy to fix it though:

% fd -0 kustomization.yaml | ifne xargs -0 -n 1 ack "base/mongo" -l

…adding -0 to fd instructs it to print the results null-separated (\0) instead of newline (\n) separated. And the corresponding switch in xargs instructs it to expect null-separated input.

I especially like this approach because it’s easy to memorize.