Sometimes I see a command like
find . -name * -exec ls -a {} \;
I was asked to execute this.
What does {} \; mean here?
1 Answer
The \; is a ; fed to the program (find) by the \ escape preventing it from be handled by the shell (normally would separate commands). The -exec argument interprets everything as a command up to that inserted ; that ends the -exec stuff. Within the -exec stuff an argument of {} means "insert the file name here". So if the files were "foo" and "bar" it would execute "ls -a foo" then "ls -a bar". So all that meaning only means that because -exec is there.
The -name * part of it might have been meant with * in quotes. If it is not in quotes it will do very unpredictable things because all the file names will be inserted in place of the * you have, and those names might do bad stuff to this command. Leave -name * out for a safer run of this command (but I don't know your intentions to understand why that was in there).
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For the find command with the
-name *argument, If you aren't sure if you need quotes around your*, then you should add double, or single quotes. So it should be-name "*". To make it easier to see what happens when you don't use quotes type this command:set +x; find . -name * -printand you'll see that what is actually passed to the find command isfind . -name file1 file2 file3 file4 -print(if you hadfile1, file2, file3, and file4) in your current directory.– PatSMar 10, 2021 at 21:16
findcommands for Unix, Linux, OSX, Windows and probably everything else. That looks like *nix but I can't be sure.