What’s the {} in find /path/ -exec command ‘{}’ do

find

I'm curious as to what the {} in the following command is actually for?

Example Command:

find /foo/ -name "*.txt" -exec rm -v {} \;

The Man page provided a small blurb but it confused me a little bit:

The string '{}' is replaced by the current file name being processed
everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just in
arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find.

Best Answer

That's the symbol that gets replaced by the file name that find comes up with.

Related Solutions

Find Command – What Does the ‘+’ Do in ‘find /path/ -exec command ‘{}’ +’?

The '+' makes one big command line out of all found files to minimize the number of commands to be run.

Given the case that a find command finds four files.

find . -type f -exec command '{}' \;

would produce

command file1
command file2
command file3
command file4

On the other hand

find . -type f -exec command '{}' \+

produces

command file1 file2 file3 file4

Linux shell: find -exec in find -exec

In this very case, you can use chmod -R as per Evan's answer, but in the general case, you can do:

find ~/.config/google-chrome -type d -name test -exec sh -c '
  for i do
    find "$i" -exec chmod 555 {\} +
  done' sh {} +

The trick being to use a shell and use quoting so that the inner {} is not expanded by the outer find.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Find Command – What Does the ‘+’ Do in ‘find /path/ -exec command ‘{}’ +’?

Linux shell: find -exec in find -exec

Related Question