[bash] find -exec with multiple commands

I am trying to use find -exec with multiple commands without any success. Does anybody know if commands such as the following are possible?

find *.txt -exec echo "$(tail -1 '{}'),$(ls '{}')" \;

Basically, I am trying to print the last line of each txt file in the current directory and print at the end of the line, a comma followed by the filename.

should use xargs :)

find *.txt -type f -exec tail -1 {} \; | xargs -ICONSTANT echo $(pwd),CONSTANT

another one (working on osx)

find *.txt -type f -exec echo ,$(PWD) {} + -exec tail -1 {} + | tr ' ' '/'

A find+xargs answer.

The example below finds all .html files and creates a copy with the .BAK extension appended (e.g. 1.html > 1.html.BAK).

Single command with multiple placeholders

find . -iname "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} cp -- "{}" "{}.BAK"

Multiple commands with multiple placeholders

find . -iname "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} echo "cp -- {} {}.BAK ; echo {} >> /tmp/log.txt" | sh

# if you need to do anything bash-specific then pipe to bash instead of sh

This command will also work with files that start with a hyphen or contain spaces such as -my file.html thanks to parameter quoting and the -- after cp which signals to cp the end of parameters and the beginning of the actual file names.

-print0 pipes the results with null-byte terminators.

for xargs the -I {} parameter defines {} as the placeholder; you can use whichever placeholder you like; -0 indicates that input items are null-separated.

I don't know if you can do this with find, but an alternate solution would be to create a shell script and to run this with find.

lastline.sh:

echo $(tail -1 $1),$1

Make the script executable

chmod +x lastline.sh

Use find:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec ./lastline.sh {} \;

I usually embed the find in a small for loop one liner, where the find is executed in a subcommand with $().

Your command would look like this then:

for f in $(find *.txt); do echo "$(tail -1 $f), $(ls $f)"; done

The good thing is that instead of {} you just use $f and instead of the -exec … you write all your commands between do and ; done.

Not sure what you actually want to do, but maybe something like this?

for f in $(find *.txt); do echo $f; tail -1 $f; ls -l $f; echo; done

Another way is like this:

multiple_cmd() { 
    tail -n1 $1; 
    ls $1 
}; 
export -f multiple_cmd; 
find *.txt -exec bash -c 'multiple_cmd "$0"' {} \;

in one line

multiple_cmd() { tail -1 $1; ls $1 }; export -f multiple_cmd; find *.txt -exec bash -c 'multiple_cmd "$0"' {} \;

• "multiple_cmd()" - is a function
• "export -f multiple_cmd" - will export it so any other subshell can see it
• "find *.txt -exec bash -c 'multiple_cmd "$0"' {} \;" - find that will execute the function on your example

In this way multiple_cmd can be as long and as complex, as you need.

Hope this helps.

find . -type d -exec sh -c "echo -n {}; echo -n ' x '; echo {}" \;

Thanks to Camilo Martin, I was able to answer a related question:

What I wanted to do was

find ... -exec zcat {} | wc -l \;

which didn't work. However,

find ... | while read -r file; do echo "$file: `zcat $file | wc -l`"; done

does work, so thank you!

Extending @Tinker's answer,

In my case, I needed to make a command | command | command inside the -exec to print both the filename and the found text in files containing a certain text.

I was able to do it with:

find . -name config -type f \( -exec  grep "bitbucket" {} \; -a -exec echo {} \;  \) 

the result is:

    url = [email protected]:a/a.git
./a/.git/config
    url = [email protected]:b/b.git
./b/.git/config
    url = [email protected]:c/c.git
./c/.git/config

There's an easier way:

find ... | while read -r file; do
    echo "look at my $file, my $file is amazing";
done

Alternatively:

while read -r file; do
    echo "look at my $file, my $file is amazing";
done <<< "$(find ...)"

1st answer of Denis is the answer to resolve the trouble. But in fact it is no more a find with several commands in only one exec like the title suggest. To answer the one exec with several commands thing we will have to look for something else to resolv. Here is a example:

Keep last 10000 lines of .log files which has been modified in the last 7 days using 1 exec command using severals {} references

1) see what the command will do on which files:

find / -name "*.log" -a -type f -a -mtime -7 -exec sh -c "echo tail -10000 {} \> fictmp; echo cat fictmp \> {} " \;

2) Do it: (note no more "\>" but only ">" this is wanted)

find / -name "*.log" -a -type f -a -mtime -7 -exec sh -c "tail -10000 {} > fictmp; cat fictmp > {} ; rm fictmp" \;

One of the following:

find *.txt -exec awk 'END {print $0 "," FILENAME}' {} \;

find *.txt -exec sh -c 'echo "$(tail -n 1 "$1"),$1"' _ {} \;

find *.txt -exec sh -c 'echo "$(sed -n "\$p" "$1"),$1"' _ {} \;

find accepts multiple -exec portions to the command. For example:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec echo {} \; -exec grep banana {} \;

Note that in this case the second command will only run if the first one returns successfully, as mentioned by @Caleb. If you want both commands to run regardless of their success or failure, you could use this construct:

find . -name "*.txt" \( -exec echo {} \; -o -exec true \; \) -exec grep banana {} \;