'find -exec' a shell function in Linux 'find -exec' a shell function in Linux shell shell

'find -exec' a shell function in Linux


Since only the shell knows how to run shell functions, you have to run a shell to run a function. You also need to mark your function for export with export -f, otherwise the subshell won't inherit them:

export -f dosomethingfind . -exec bash -c 'dosomething "$0"' {} \;


find . | while read file; do dosomething "$file"; done


Jac's answer is great, but it has a couple of pitfalls that are easily overcome:

find . -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do dosomething "$file"; done

This uses null as a delimiter instead of a linefeed, so filenames with line feeds will work. It also uses the -r flag which disables backslash escaping, and without it backslashes in filenames won't work. It also clears IFS so that potential trailing white spaces in names are not discarded.