Bash – Fix ‘find -exec cd’ Error: No Such File or Directory

bashcd-commandfind

When I run this command it works:

$ find . -inum 888696 -exec ls '{}' \;
Conversation.pst  Outlook Data File  Outlook Data File.sbd  Trash      Unsent Messages
Inbox.pst     Outlook Data File.msf  Sent.pst       Trash.msf  Unsent Messages.msf

However, When replacing ls with cd it does not work:

$ find . -inum 888696 -exec cd '{}' \;
find: ‘cd’: No such file or directory

I know cd is a bash built-in, so I tried this which does not work either:

$ find . -inum 888696 -exec builtin cd '{}' \;
find: ‘builtin’: No such file or directory

How can I use cd along with find -exec command?

UPDATE

The reason I'm trying to use cd with find -exec is that the directory name is a strange one which shows up on my terminal as something like ????.

Best Answer

The -exec option to find executes an external utility, possibly with some command line option and other arguments.

Your Unix does not provide cd as an external utility, only as a shell built-in, so find fails to execute it. At least macOS and Solaris do provide cd as an external utility.

There would be little or no use for executing cd in this way, except as a way of testing whether the pathname found by find is a directory into which you would be able to cd. The working directory in your interactive shell (or whatever is calling find) would not change anyway.

If you're having issues with a directory's name being strange or extremely difficult to type, and you want to change into that directory, then consider creating a symbolic link to the directory and then cd into it using that link instead:

find . -inum 888696 -exec ln -s {} thedir ';'

This would create a symbolic link named thedir that would point to the problematic directory. You may then change working directory with

cd thedir

(if the link exists in the current directory). This avoids modifying the directory in any way. Another idea would be to rename the directory in a similar way with find, but that would not be advisable if another program expects the directory to have that particular name.

Related Solutions

Bash Find Command – How to Use Two Bash Commands in -exec

As for the find command, you can also just add more -exec commands in a row:

find . -name "*" -exec chgrp -v new_group '{}' \; -exec chmod -v 770 '{}' \;

Note that this command is, in its result, equivalent of using

chgrp -v new_group file && chmod -v 770 file

on each file.

All the find's parameters such as -name, -exec, -size and so on, are actually tests: find will continue to run them one by one as long as the entire chain so far has evaluated to true. So each consecutive -exec command is executed only if the previous ones returned true (i.e. 0 exit status of the commands). But find also understands logic operators such as or (-o) and not (!). Therefore, to use a chain of -exec tests regardless of the previous results, one would need to use something like this:

find . -name "*" \( -exec chgrp -v new_group {} \; -o -true \) -exec chmod -v 770 {} \;

Bash – Cannot exec /bin/false: no such file or directory

Have a look in your shell initialisation scripts for bash, or the screen config file, and see if there's anywhere false is being used with the explicit path /bin/false.

On macOS, the false utility is located in /usr/bin, not in /bin.

Failing that, see if your login shell for some odd reason is set to /bin/false, either by inspecting /etc/passwd or looking at the "Advanced Options" in the "User & Groups" section of the System Preferences (you get these by right-clicking on your user in the list of user accounts, and you may change the shell here too). Someone may have unthinkingly followed a tutorial/HOWTO which sets up a user with /bin/false as their default shell.

When you run screen with sudo you use root's shell/screen init files. This is why that works.

UPDATE

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash Find Command – How to Use Two Bash Commands in -exec

Bash – Cannot exec /bin/false: no such file or directory

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