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I was working on a lab and was having trouble with the function of part of a command we are supposed to learn. Here it is:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec ls -l {} \;

I have determined that the find . -name "*.txt" is finding all files in the current directory with the extension .txt, however I am not sure what -exec ls -1 {} \; is doing within the command. Any help or basic explanation would be much appreciated.

NewToProgramming
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1 Answers1

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If we split this by parts:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec ls -l {} \;
  • find . = Find all files/directories starting from the current directory
  • -name "*.txt" = Filter only files/directories with names ending in *.txt
  • -exec = Execute the following command for each file
    • ls -l {} = Run ls -l ({} gets substituted with the name of the file)
    • \; = end of command
Stewart
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