exec,find

Execute multiple commands with exec and find:

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Is it possible to execute multiple commands using exec on the Linux/UNIX find command output ?

The answer is "yes". Each -exec action is to be associated with a escaped semi-colon (\;)

e.g.

I had to find files named "1251936000.log" and then need to perform two actions on it:

- Count number of lines in the file.

- Do a "ls -l" listing of the file.

And the find command I wrote with exec:

$ find . -name 1251936000.log -exec wc -l {} \; -exec ls -l {} \;

Output:

   6924 ./lv1/1251936000.log

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 977264 Sep  4 00:17 ./lv1/1251936000.log

List empty directories using find in bash:

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Linux command find gives an option called "empty" using which we can list empty regular files or empty directories.

e.g.

To list all the empty directories

$ find . -type d -empty

Output: 

./bdb/prac

./sim/old/data

./prac/testd

Linux find command and logical operators :

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Some of the example to show how we can use logical operators with linux find command.

To find any file whose name ends with either 'sh' or 'pl'

$ find . -type f \( -iname "*.sh" -or -iname "*.pl" \)

To find .txt files that are writeable by "others"

$ find . -type f \( -iname "*.txt" -and -perm -o=w \)

To find .txt files but exclude the ones which are writeable by "others"

$ find . -type f \( -iname "*.txt" ! -perm -o=w \)

or

some find versions support "-not" as well

$ find . -type f \( -iname "*.txt" -not -perm -o=w \)

Remember: The parentheses must be escaped with a backslash, "\(" and "\)", to prevent them from being interpreted as special shell characters.