UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

my solaris text talks about the 'find' command... it further goes to talk about an "action" used with the find command.

I am completely confused as to what the {} do with the find comand.

the explanation is this: "A set of braces, {}, delimits where the file name is passed to the command from the prceding expressions."

Now what does this mean? It makes no sense to me.

an example they give is the following:

$ find ~ -name core -exec rm {} \;

Basically it just means find is going to pass the files it found to what ever command you specify. In your example, find going to locate core files and send them as output to the rm command. It's just a fancy way to find stuff and delete it at the same time.

Just answer your question about the {} braces.....

The braces become the result set from the find command....... so your rm {} will effectively do a "rm /dira/cor /dirb/core /dirc/core"

Replacing the {} with all returned arguments from the find query. So for example if you wanted to cp the result of your search to a certain directory you could use:

find . -name my_file -exec cp {} /export/home/all_my_files/ \;

This would copy the file it found on the file system to your specified directory. Obviously for this you could only do it for a single return.....as if find retrieves multiple instances (as with your core search) then you'd be in a world of pain.

If you want multiple things to be done...i.e. renaming the result files then you'd use the xargs command (RTM).