Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Executing a command

The find command can be coupled with many of the other commands using the -exec option.

Consider the previous example. We used -perm to find files that do not have proper permissions. Similarly, in the case where we need to change the ownership of all files owned by a certain user (for example, root) to another user (for example, www-data, the default Apache user in the web server), we can find all the files owned by root using the -user option and use -exec to perform the ownership change operation.

You must run the find command as root if you want to change the ownership of files or directories.

The find command uses an open/close curly brace pair {} to represent the filename. In the next example, each time find identifies ...