according to the many sources the exec command other than its use in find and escaping the shell, has another definitive use.. which I am having a hard time understanding.
according to many resources and info pages that I have read I can use the exec command with a file descriptor.. such as
exec 1< file
or
exec 5>&0
I do not quite understand what a file descriptor is and what is the purpose of this (pattern) or (expression)..
any feedback welcome
moxxx68

If you write a script, you can send input into it like this:

./somescript < inputfile

The script can accomplish the same thing internally by using:
exec < inputfile

After that line, the script's input is inputfile. It can do the same to output:

exec > somescript.log 2>&1

This send stderr and stdout combined into the file. There is more to it, but this is the basics.

correct me if I am wrong (i saw a similiar example to what you are saying in tha perl man pages)..
$ page some.script
#!/bin/sh
#basename
fd=basename
etc etc
$page input.file
#!/bin/sh
# input.file
etc etc
exec fd < input.file
etc etc
fi

The trouble is that exec can do several different things...it really needs to be several commands. The code you gave won't work. Change that to
exec $fd < inputfile
and it probably will. But that is not what's meant by an fd.

A fd is always an integer. In shell scripts, it will be a very low integer. By convention:
0 = standard input
1 = standard output
2 = standard error output

The idea is that you write your program to output to fd 1 without knowing what fd one is. Then at execution time you can do stuff like:
echo this > first.file
echo that > second.file

It would be terrible if echo always sent stuff to "first.file". You would need to do:
echo that
cp first.file second.file
or something like that.

By default 0 1 2 are all connected to /dev/tty so you can type input to a program and see the results in your window.

Here is an experiment I just did:
$ expr 1 + 2
3
$ expr 1 + 2 > expr.out
$ cat expr.out
3
$ expr cat + dog > expr.out
expr: non-numeric argument
$

With the last expr command, I have an error. Since the error goes to 2 which is still /dev/tty, I see it immediately, even though the standard which is 1 goes to a file. That why we have both 1 and 2. You can send 1 into a file while 2 is still displayed to you.

Don't want to see error messages? Bad idea usually, but you can do:
expr cat + dog > expr.out 2>/dev/null

And now error messages are thrown away.

expr cat + dog > expr.out
really means
expr cat + dog 1> expr.out
but if you leave the integer off, 1 is assumed for > while 0 is assumed for <

where does :
exec 3
exec 4
exec 5
come into the picture.. ?
so far I have understood the stdout and stderr
but i don't see how this the use of exec or the use of fd 3 can write to a file. or how fd 4 can read stndin and how fd 5 can stdout to tty.. i am not making the connection between the numbers and the exec command basically for 3 to 5.

They are other integers that relate to files. Some programs are too complex to fit into a stdin/stdout model. Some scripts simply need more stuff as well. A contrived example:

exec 3> john.out
exec 4>paul.out
exec 5>george.out
exec 6>ringo.out

echo harrison >&5
echo lennon >&3

With these echo statements, something like >&3 really means 1>&3 which means send fd 1 into whatever fd 3 is pointing to. Nobody actually writes to 3 in this case. 3 is kind of a placeholder. With the korn shell, you can do

print -u6 starr

where the -u6 says to actually use fd 6. And you might write a c program with statements like:
write(4, "mccartney", 10);

With a program like that, you may need to connect something to fd 4 if the program itself doesn't do it.