UNIX FAQ Version 2.1 92/12/04 -- Question 3.4

Why doesn't find's "{}" symbol do what I want?

"find" has a -exec option that will execute a particular command on all the selected files. Find will replace any "{}" it sees with the name of the file currently under consideration. So, some day you might try to use "find" to run a command on every file, one directory at a time. You might try this: find /path -type d -exec command {}/\* \; hoping that find will execute, in turn command directory1/* command directory2/* ... Unfortunately, find only expands the "{}" token when it appears by itself. Find will leave anything else like "{}/*" alone, so instead of doing what you want, it will do command {}/* command {}/* ... once for each directory. This might be a bug, it might be a feature, but we're stuck with the current behaviour. So how do you get around this? One way would be to write a trivial little shell script, let's say "./doit", that consists of command "$1"/* You could then use find /path -type d -exec ./doit {} \; Or if you want to avoid the "./doit" shell script, you can use find /path -type d -exec sh -c 'command $0/*' {} \; (This works because within the 'command' of "sh -c 'command' A B C ...", $0 expands to A, $1 to B, and so on.) or you can use the construct-a-command-with-sed trick find /path -type d -print | sed 's:.*:command &/*:' | sh If all you're trying to do is cut down on the number of times that "command" is executed, you should see if your system has the "xargs" command. Xargs reads arguments one line at a time from the standard input and assembles as many of them as will fit into one command line. You could use find /path -print | xargs command which would result in one or more executions of command file1 file2 file3 file4 dir1/file1 dir1/file2 Unfortunately this is not a perfectly robust or secure solution. Xargs expects its input lines to be terminated with newlines, so it will be confused by files with odd characters such as newlines in their names.