Post #3992568

Idk how versed you are on Bash Parameter Expansion or the find command, so I’d like to expand (pun intended) a little more on Jo Miran’s explanation (if you already know, I’ll leave this for others who may not): find’s -exec (and -execdir) option takes everything after it until a semicolon — which usually needs to be escaped, so the shell doesn’t accidentally treat it as the command separator special character — as a command to run and arguments to pass to that command. Furthermore, when using the -exec option, find treats all instances of {} as places where it should substitute the files it matched So breaking down -exec bash -c ‘mv “$0” “${0/crunk/chunk}”’ {} \; really just tells find to take the name of a file it found (in this example it would only match dir1/crunk) and put it after the command bash -c ‘mv “$0” “${0/crunk/chunk}”’ So now the command to run looks like bash -c ‘mv “$0” “${0/crunk/chunk}”’ dir1/crunk this command spawns a (sub)shell, bash, tells it to run the next argument as a command, -c, gives it that command to run, mv “$0” “${0/crunk/chunk}”, and passes filename as an argument, dir1/crunk So now let’s talk shell parameters Usually $0 is a special parameter that references the shell (or script) that invoked the command. In the case of using the -c option, bash actually changes $0 to be the argument after the command to run: dir1/crunk So now the command looks more like mv “dir1/crunk” “${0/crunk/chunk}” So let’s finally get to the finish line: shell parameter expansion. Shell parameters (aka shell variables) can be written with curly braces around the name, so $SHELL and ${SHELL} refer to the same thing. But the curly braces can also let the shell know that if it sees certain special characters after the variable’s name, it should do some transformations to the contents of the variable. In this case ${0/crunk/chunk} takes the contents of $0, searches for the first instance of the string ”crunk", and replaces it with “chunk” before inserting it into the command. So now the final command to run looks like mv “dir1/crunk” "dir1/chunk” Also worth mentioning that the -name option of find accepts wildcards in its argument. I would also recommend using the -execdir option instead of -exec in this specific case, because it will run commands from inside the directories where it finds the files. In this case, that means {} would expand to ./crunk instead of dir1/crunk; this will be relevant in about 3 paragraphs. So now you can tweak the command to your needs. If you wanted to find more than one file that, for example, all had a “u” somewhere in the name, you could do so thusly find dir1 -name ”*u*" And then if you wanted to change all the "r"s in the filenames to "l"s, you could do: find dir1 -name “*u*” -type f -execdir bash -c ‘mv “$0” “${0/r/l}”’ {} \; Note that you could not do this with the regular -exec option, as it would try to mv dir1/crunk dil1/clunk and throw an error because that directory (dil1) likely doesn’t exist… and even if it did, you don’t want your command moving files to different directories without your knowledge