OSX basename Command – Troubleshooting Issues

Try the execdir option for find: it executes the command you specify in the directory of the file, using only its basename as the argument

From what I gather, you want to create "a" and "b" in the "main" directory. We can do that by combining $PWD and the -execdir option. Have a look at the solution below. (The && find … ls parts are for output only, so you can see the effects. You'll want to use the command before the &&.)

First, I set up the testing environment:

-----[ 15:40:17 ] (!6293) [ :-) ] janmoesen@mail ~/stack 
$ mkdir test && touch test/{a,b} && find . -exec ls -dalF {} +
drwxr-xr-x 3 janmoesen janmoesen 4096 2012-05-31 15:40 ./
drwxr-xr-x 2 janmoesen janmoesen 4096 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/
-rw-r--r-- 1 janmoesen janmoesen    0 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/a
-rw-r--r-- 1 janmoesen janmoesen    0 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/b

This is what happens when you use a simple -exec — the original files are touched:

-----[ 15:40:30 ] (!6294) [ :-) ] janmoesen@mail ~/stack 
$ find test -type f -exec touch {} \; && find . -exec ls -dalF {} +
drwxr-xr-x 3 janmoesen janmoesen 4096 2012-05-31 15:40 ./
drwxr-xr-x 2 janmoesen janmoesen 4096 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/
-rw-r--r-- 1 janmoesen janmoesen    0 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/a
-rw-r--r-- 1 janmoesen janmoesen    0 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/b

However, if we combine $PWD with the argument placeholder {} and use -execdir, we achieve what (I think) you want:

-----[ 15:40:57 ] (!6295) [ :-) ] janmoesen@mail ~/stack 
$ find test -type f -execdir touch "$PWD/{}" \; && find . -exec ls -dalF {} +
drwxr-xr-x 3 janmoesen janmoesen 4096 2012-05-31 15:41 ./
-rw-r--r-- 1 janmoesen janmoesen    0 2012-05-31 15:41 ./a
-rw-r--r-- 1 janmoesen janmoesen    0 2012-05-31 15:41 ./b
drwxr-xr-x 2 janmoesen janmoesen 4096 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/
-rw-r--r-- 1 janmoesen janmoesen    0 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/a
-rw-r--r-- 1 janmoesen janmoesen    0 2012-05-31 15:40 ./test/b

Try:

find -iname "*.txt" -exec sh -c 'for f do basename -- "$f" .txt;done' sh {} +

Your first command failed, because $(...) run in subshell, which treat {} as literal. so basename {} .txt return {}, your find became:

find . -iname "*.txt" -exec echo {} \;

which print file name matched.