Difference Between -name and -iname in FIND Command

(Adapted from How do I recursively grep through compressed archives?)

Install AVFS, a filesystem that provides transparent access inside archives. First run this command once to set up a view of your machine's filesystem in which you can access archives as if they were directories:

mountavfs

After this, if /path/to/archive.zip is a recognized archive, then ~/.avfs/path/to/archive.zip# is a directory that appears to contain the contents of the archive.

find ~/.avfs"$PWD" \( -name '*.7z' -o -name '*.zip' -o -name '*.tar.gz' -o -name '*.tgz' \) \
     -exec sh -c '
                  find "$0#" -name "*vacation*.jpg"
                 ' {} 'Test::Version' \;

Explanations:

• Mount the AVFS filesystem.
• Look for archive files in ~/.avfs$PWD, which is the AVFS view of the current directory.
• For each archive, execute the specified shell snippet (with $0 = archive name and $1 = pattern to search).
• $0# is the directory view of the archive $0.
• {\} rather than {} is needed in case the outer find substitutes {} inside -exec ; arguments (some do it, some don't).

Or in zsh ≥4.3:

mountavfs
ls -l ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.(7z|tgz|tar.gz|zip)(e\''
     reply=($REPLY\#/**/*vacation*.jpg(.N))
'\')

Explanations:

• ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.(7z|tgz|tar.gz|zip) matches archives in the AVFS view of the current directory and its subdirectories.
• PATTERN(e\''CODE'\') applies CODE to each match of PATTERN. The name of the matched file is in $REPLY. Setting the reply array turns the match into a list of names.
• $REPLY\# is the directory view of the archive.
• $REPLY\#/**/*vacation*.jpg matches *vacation*.jpg files in the archive.
• The N glob qualifier makes the pattern expand to an empty list if there is no match.

The man page for GNU find describes -execdir in part thusly:

Like -exec, but the specified command is run from the subdirectory containing the matched file, which is not normally the directory in which you started find.

So there is no real subtlety involved. -exec invokes the command from the directory that you run find from (and thus needs to provide the path either relative to that directory or absolute from the root), and -execdir invokes the command from the directory containing the file and thus doesn't need to provide the full path, so does not.

To get the behavior you are after, you should use -exec rather than -execdir.

You can demonstrate this behavior by replacing your rm invocation with for example echo to simply print the list of parameters (in this case, the file name). Or use -print which does that without needing to invoke an external command. (Note: -print is also the default action if none is given.)

If you didn't need the confirmation, you could have used -delete instead. For large number of files that is also likely to be more efficient as it avoids having to invoke rm time and time again.