How can I use two bash commands in -exec of find command?
As for the find
command, you can also just add more -exec
commands in a row:
find . -name "*" -exec chgrp -v new_group '{}' \; -exec chmod -v 770 '{}' \;
Note that this command is, in its result, equivalent of using
chgrp -v new_group file && chmod -v 770 file
on each file.
All the find
's parameters such as -name
, -exec
, -size
and so on, are actually tests: find
will continue to run them one by one as long as the entire chain so far has evaluated to true. So each consecutive -exec
command is executed only if the previous ones returned true (i.e. 0
exit status of the commands). But find
also understands logic operators such as or (-o
) and not (!
). Therefore, to use a chain of -exec
tests regardless of the previous results, one would need to use something like this:
find . -name "*" \( -exec chgrp -v new_group {} \; -o -true \) -exec chmod -v 770 {} \;
find . -name "*" -exec sh -c 'chgrp -v new_group "$0" ; chmod -v 770 "$0"' {} \;
Your command is first parsed by the shell into two commands separated by a ;
, which is equivalent to a newline:
find . -name "*" -exec chgrp -v new_group {}
chmod -v 770 {} \;
If you want to run a shell command, invoke a shell explicitly with bash -c
(or sh -c
if you don't care that the shell is specifically bash):
find . -name "*" -exec sh -c 'chgrp -v new_group "$0"; chmod -v 770 "$0"' {} \;
Note the use of {}
as an argument to the shell; it's the zeroth argument (which is normally the name of the shell or script, but this doesn't matter here), hence referenced as "$0"
.
You can pass multiple file names to the shell at a time and make the shell iterate through them, it'll be faster. Here I pass _
as the script name and the following arguments are file names, which for x
(a shortcut for for x in "$@"
) iterates over.
find . -name "*" -exec sh -c 'for x; do chgrp -v new_group "$x"; chmod -v 770 "$x"; done' _ {} +
Note that since bash 4, or in zsh, you don't need find at all here. In bash, run shopt -s globstar
(put it in your ~/.bashrc
) to activate **/
standing for a recursive directory glob. (In zsh, this is active all the time.) Then
chgrp -v new_group -- **/*; chmod -v 770 -- **/*
or if you want the files to be iterated on in order
for x in **/*; do
chgrp -v new_group -- "$x"
chmod -v 770 -- "$x"
done
One difference with the find
command is that the shell ignores dot files (files whose name begins with a .
). To include them, in bash, first set GLOBIGNORE=.:..
; in zsh, use **/*(D)
as the glob pattern.