Shell Programming and Scripting

The double quotes in this find command's -exec primary make absolutely no difference. The commands:

Code:

find /path/to/source1 -type f -mtime +30 -exec mv "{}" /path/to/BKP1 \;

and:

Code:

find /path/to/source1 -type f -mtime +30 -exec mv {} /path/to/BKP1 \;

and:

Code:

find /path/to/source1 -type f -mtime +30 -exec mv {} /path/to/BKP1 +

will all produce the same results (but the last one will run faster since mv will be executed less often to move the files). This works for any files on the system even if the filenames contain spaces, tabs, and newlines.

However, if you use something like:

Code:

find /path/to/source1 -type f -mtime +30 -print | xargs -I {} mv {} /path/to/BKP1

it won't work if any filenames contain a newline. On some systems you can get around this using -print0 in find instead of -print and then use a special option in the program reading filenames from the piped output of find, but these options are not in the standards (so they are not portable).