bash, find, exec and echo

Question

find . \
  -name 'user_prefs' \
  -exec echo "whitelist_from [email protected]" >> {} \;'

I would like to add the line whitelist_from [email protected] to all files that are found by find, but my command does not work. It just creates the file '{}'.

Shoud i use the for command?

thanks!

Solution 1

You have to escape the '>>', for example like this:

find . -name 'user_prefs' -exec sh -c 'echo "whitelist_from [email protected]" >> {}' \;

Solution 2

As said already, using xargs is encouraged, but you can also avoid executing sh many times by:

find . -name 'user_prefs' | while read filename; do echo "whitelist_from [email protected]" >>"$filename"; done

Comments

[SourceSeeker]

This is a correct answer, but I wouldn't exactly call it "escaping".

[SourceSeeker]

This is quite a bit faster than the xargs version.