Hi,

I have tried both the options in small dummy scripts, but somehow i can't differentiate between the two.

find . -name H* -exec ls -l {} \;
find . -name H* | xargs ls -l

Both work the ditto way.

Any help is appreciated.

find . -name H* -exec ls -l {} \; executes the command ls -l on each individual file.

find . -name H* | xargs ls -l constructs an argument list from the output of the find commend and passes it to ls.

consider if the ouput of the find command produced:
H1
H2
H3

the first command would execute
ls -l H1
ls -l H2
ls -l H3

but the second would execute
ls -l H1 H2 H3

As reborg mentioned, the second is faster because xargs will collect file names and execute a command with as long as a length as possible. Often this will be just a single command. This was discussed in grep command-HELP?!.

However the xargs solution will fail if the shell has trouble parsing the file names. Try:
touch "stupid name"
and then retry the two commands.

There is a third solution that combines the best of both worlds. It is in Posix but not every version of the find command supports it. It's like the first syntax except that instead of \; you just use + to terminate the command.

As Perderabo siad the + is a useful option if available, and is in POSIX but not implemented by all versions of find, most noticeably ( for a lot of people ) it is not found in the GNU version of find

from the GNU find man page:

Wow,

Just some small confusions.

Your + option works for me. How can i found out whether my find is Gnu or not.
I have tried "what find" - no use.

"stupid name" fails in xargs, but its executing in exec
Even if i do a "ls stupid name", it gives me error.
I have to quote it, does exec automatically quotes it parameters.

Thanks

Each filename is passes to exec as a single value, with special characters escaped, so it is as if the filename has been enclosed in single quotes.

Thanks,

Any idea about finding out whether my find in Gnu one or not.