How to use pipe within -exec in find

unix find exec pipe

In order to be able to use a pipe, you need to execute a shell command, i.e. the command with the pipeline has to be a single command for -exec.

find /path/to/dir -type f -print -exec sh -c "cat {} | head -1 | grep yourstring" \;

Note that the above is a Useless Use of Cat, that could be written as:

find /path/to/dir -type f -print -exec sh -c "head -1 {} | grep yourstring" \;

Another way to achieve what you want would be to say:

find /path/to/dir -type f -print -exec awk 'NR==1 && /yourstring/' {} \;

unix find exec pipe

This does not directly answer your question, but if you want to do some complex operations you might be better off scripting:

for file in $(find /path/to/dir -type f); do echo ${file}; cat $file | head -1 | grep yourstring; done

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