If you have a lot of files that may be processed by a `find` command and speed is important, it’s worth knowing about the plus-sign variation of the `-exec` exp

If you have a lot of files that may be processed by a `find` command and speed is important, it’s worth knowing about the plus-sign variation of the `-exec` expression. The command in the original article find . -name setup.py -type f -exec grep -Hn boto3 {} \; could be written as find . -name setup.py -type f -exec grep -Hn boto3 {} + The difference is that the first version (the `-exec` expression is terminated with a semi-colon) forks a new process to run the `grep` command for each individual file “found” by the preceding expressions. So, if there were 50 such `setup.py` files, the `grep` command would be invoked 50 times. Some times this is desired behaviour but in this case, `grep` can accept multiple pathnames as arguments. With the second version (expression is terminated with a plus-sign), the pathnames of the files are collected into sets so that the `grep` command is only called once for each set (similar to how the `xargs` utility works to avoid exceeding the limits on the number of arguments that can be passed to a command). This is much more efficient because only 1 `grep` child process is forked – instead of 50. This functionality was added to the POSIX specification [1] a number of years ago and I’ve been using it for at least 10 year on GNU/Linux systems. I imagine it should be available on other Unix-like environments (including BSD [2]) that data scientists are likely to be using – though the last time I had to work on a friend’s Mac the installed versions of the BSD utilities were quite old. [1]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ [2]: https://man.openbsd.org/find.1 https://man.openbsd.org/find.1