4 ms·
I've never quite understood the point of find's -exec option. What's wrong with a pipe?
by ordinary 15y ago
I've never quite understood the point of find's -exec option. What's wrong with a pipe?
- CarolineW 15y agoYou can embed the name returned by find into the middle of lengthy commands by using the -exec option - it can be harder to do that with a pipe. It's also more resilient (in some cases) to filenames that have spaces in them.
- arantius 15y agoBecause it's a good/easy way to insert the file name into the _middle_ of the statement. For example: find . -name "*.gif" -exec convert "{}" "{}.png" \; Will convert every GIF in the current directory (and its descendants) into a PNG, assuming imagemagick's convert is on your path. Is there a better way? Not that I know of.