Editing Find (Unix) (section)

===Execute an action===
<syntaxhighlight lang="console">
$ find /var/ftp/mp3 -name '*.mp3' -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
</syntaxhighlight>
This command changes the [[File system permissions|permissions]] of all regular files whose names end with ''.mp3'' in the directory tree ''/var/ftp/mp3''. The action is carried out by specifying the statement <code>-exec [[chmod]] 644 {} \;</code> in the command. For every regular file whose name ends in <code>.mp3</code>, the command <code>chmod 644 {}</code> is executed replacing <code>{}</code> with the name of the file. The semicolon (backslashed to avoid the shell interpreting it as a command separator) indicates the end of the command. Permission <code>644</code>, usually shown as <code>rw-r--r--</code>, gives the file owner full permission to read and write the file, while other users have read-only access. In some shells, the <code>{}</code> must be quoted. The trailing "{{code|;}}" is customarily quoted with a leading "{{code|\}}", but could just as effectively be enclosed in single quotes.

Note that the command itself should '''not''' be quoted; otherwise you get error messages like
<syntaxhighlight lang="output">
find: echo "mv ./3bfn rel071204": No such file or directory
</syntaxhighlight>
which means that <code>find</code> is trying to run a file called '{{code|2=sh|echo "mv ./3bfn rel071204"}}' and failing.

If you will be executing over many results, it is more efficient to use a variant of the exec primary that collects filenames up to {{mono|ARG_MAX}} and then executes COMMAND with a list of filenames.

<syntaxhighlight lang="console">
$ find . -exec COMMAND {} +
</syntaxhighlight>
This will ensure that filenames with whitespaces are passed to the executed {{code|COMMAND}} without being split up by the shell.