find missing argument to -exec

Question

I was helped out today with a command  but it doesn t seem to be working  This is the command   find  home me download  -type f -name    rm  -exec ffmpeg -i    -sameq    mp3  amp  amp  rm        The shell returns  find  missing argument to  -exec    What I am basically trying to do is go through a directory recursively  if it has other directories  and run the ffmpeg command on the  rm file types and convert them to  mp3 file types  Once this is done  remove the  rm file that has just been converted   I appreciate any help on this

User · Accepted Answer

I figured it out now  When you need to run two commands in exec in a find you need to actually have two separate execs  This finally worked for me   find   -type f -name    rm  -exec ffmpeg -i    -sameq    mp3    -exec rm

User · Answer

Both    and  amp  amp  will cause problems due to being expanded by the command line  I would suggest trying   find  home me download  -type f -name    rm  -exec ffmpeg -i     -sameq     mp3    -exec rm

User · Answer

You have to put a space between    and     So the command will be like   find  home me download  -type f -name    rm  -exec ffmpeg -i    -sameq    mp3  amp  amp  rm

User · Answer

If you are still getting  find  missing argument to -exec  try wrapping the execute argument in quotes   find  lt file path gt  -type f -exec  chmod 664

User · Answer

A -exec command must be terminated with a    so you usually need to type    or     to avoid interpretion by the shell  or a    The difference is that with    the command is called once per file  with    it is called just as few times as possible  usually once  but there is a maximum length for a command line  so it might be split up  with all filenames  See this example     cat  tmp echoargs    bin sh echo  1 -  2 -  3   find  tmp foo -exec  tmp echoargs        tmp foo - -  tmp foo one - -  tmp foo two - -   find  tmp foo -exec  tmp echoargs       tmp foo -  tmp foo one -  tmp foo two   Your command has two errors   First  you use      but the   must be a parameter of its own   Second  the command ends at the  amp  amp   You specified    run find  and if that was successful  remove the file named          If you want to use shell stuff in the -exec command  you need to explicitly run it in a shell  such as -exec sh -c  ffmpeg      amp  amp  rm    However you should not add the    inside the bash command  it will produce problems when there are special characters  Instead  you can pass additional parameters to the shell after -c command string  see man sh      ls   echo damn     find   -exec sh -c  echo          damn    find   -exec sh -c  echo   1   -         echo damn     You see the   thing is evaluated by the shell in the first example  Imagine there was a file called   rm -rf     -    Side note  The - is not needed  but the first variable after the command is assigned to the variable  0  which is a special variable normally containing the name of the program being run and setting that to a parameter is a little unclean  though it won t cause any harm here probably  so we set that to just - and start with  1    So your command could be something like  find -exec bash -c  ffmpeg -i   1  -sameq   1  mp3  amp  amp  rm   1  mp3  -         But there is a better way  find supports and and or  so you may do stuff like find -name foo -or -name bar  But that also works with -exec  which evaluates to true if the command exits successfully  and to false if not  See this example     ls false  true   find   -exec       -and -print true   It only runs the print if the command was successfully  which it did for true but not for false   So you can use two exec statements chained with an -and  and it will only execute the latter if the former was run successfully

User · Answer

Also  if anyone else has the  find  missing argument to -exec  this might help   In some shells you don t need to do the escaping  i e  you don t need the     in front of the       find  lt file path gt  -name  myFile    -exec rm - f

User · Answer

You need to do some escaping I think   find  home me download  -type f -name    rm  -exec ffmpeg -i     -sameq    mp3   amp   amp  rm

User · Answer

Try putting a space before each     Works     find   -name    log  -exec echo         Doesn t Work   find   -name    log  -exec echo

User · Answer

Just for your information  I have just tried using  find -exec  command on a Cygwin system  UNIX emulated on Windows   and there it seems that the backslash before the semicolon must be removed  find    -name  blabla  -exec wc -l

User · Answer

Just in case anyone sees a similar  missing -exec args  in Amazon Opsworks Chef bash scripts  I needed to add another backslash to escape the     bash  remove wars  do   user  ubuntu    cwd       code  lt  lt -EOH     find  home ubuntu wars -type f -name    war  -exec rm          EOH   ignore failure true end

User · Answer

For anyone else having issues when using GNU find binary in a Windows command prompt  The semicolon needs to be escaped with   find exe   -name  quot   rm quot  -exec ffmpeg -i    -sameq    mp3

[bash] find: missing argument to -exec

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