Getting error “xargs unterminated quote” when tried to print the number of lines in terminal

Question

I want to get the number of lines in my application. I am using this code:

find . \"(\" -name \"*.m\" -or -name \"*.h\" \")\" -print | xargs wc -l

Answer 1

This can happen because you have a single quote in a filename somewhere...

i.e., -> '

To find the problem file, run the following in the terminal:

\find . | grep \' 

and it can also happen if you have an alias for xargs setup that's causing an issue. To test if this is the case, just run xargs with a \ in front of it, e.g.

\find . | \xargs ....

The "" simply means "run the command without any aliases"