Bash – How to run “find -exec

Best Answer

You are missing the space between {} and ; :

find . -type d -exec ./script.sh {} \;

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 – can I do : find … -exec this && that

-exec is a predicate that runs a command (not a shell) and evaluates to true or false based on the outcome of the command (zero or non-zero exit status).

So:

find . -iname '*.csv' -exec grep foo {} \; -print

would print the file path if grep finds foo in the file. Instead of -print you can use another -exec predicate or any other predicate

find . -iname '*.csv' -exec grep foo {} \; -exec echo {} \;

See also the ! and -o find operators for negation and or.

Alternatively, you can start a shell as:

find . -iname '*.csv' -exec sh -c '
   grep foo "$1" && echo "$1"' sh {} \;

Or to avoid having to start a shell for every file:

find . -iname '*.csv' -exec sh -c '
  for i do
    grep foo "$i" && echo "$i"
  done' sh {} +