Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi
Purpose is to have a utility command to find and edit files .
I tried a function like the following in my .profile file


function vifind(){
find . -name $1 -print -exec vi {} \;
}

Is this correct? is there a better way to do it?
I see this behaving a bit strange in case of AIX, and it does not do a group edit. Instead, I am forced to vi each file one by one.

also, any help in explaining the -exec syntax will be appreciated.
How exactly -exec <anycommand> {} \; works? what is the reason behind {} \; ?


Thanks in advance

The command you have used opens one file at a time...

Try whether this helps...

vi $(find . -name $1 | paste -s -)

That worked!
me being a n00b, could you please explain about
-exec and {} and \?

$ ls
test.log tmp1 tmp3

$ find . -name "tmp*"
./tmp1
./tmp3

$ find . -name "tmp*" -exec echo {} " is the file" \;
./tmp1 is the file
./tmp3 is the file

-exec - the command following -exec is executed against the every file found through find command

{} - this can be used in the place of file name in the -exec command because we are not sure what is going to be file name in the command while exectuing the command... say for example, for rm command we need to mention the file name but we don't know the file name, hence we say -exec rm {}... at the time of execution {} will be replaced with the current file of find command.
\; - is just syntax, I don't see any special reason for it, may be I don't know as well... I think it is just mandatory to use in the end along with -exec...

another example :

$ find . -name "tmp*" -exec mv {} {}.bkup \;

is equalent to find all tmp files and mv <filename> <filename>.tmp

you can use {} any number of times to represent the file name.

Thanks a ton!
i really appreciate ur help

hmm just making a guess for the \;, as mahendr said exec works on each file which is a result of find. basically exec spawns a process for each result of find, and executes the command, I think to allow multiple commands to be executed on a single command line you need the ;, but again ; is a special shell built-in character, hence you need to escape it with the \, hence the \;
a point to note here is in case you have lots of files as a result of find, you will end up using lots of process by exec, so then you can have an option to use xargs, instead of exec. finding the difference between the 2 is a different thread, and you might find it posted on some forum on this site. if you dont, lemme know, at the moment i m a bit lazy to explain that ( or maybe i dont know it either )

./Example/pnlang/index.html
./Example/pnblocks/index.html
./Example/pnstyle/index.html
./Example/index.html
./legal/pndocs/index.html


this is the result of:
find . -exec grep -q "function v470" '{}' \; -print

How can I use this data to delete each file under this condition. How do I pipe each result into another command?

I want to do something like:
find . -exec grep -q "function v470" -exec rm {} -rdf

Any help GREATLY appreciated.