Question

I am trying to figure out what the following command would do. I extracted it from a Linux shell script and when I enter it goes to a prompt (>). But I cannot figure out what to enter in this prompt.

    find ~/dev/tools/flex-4.5.0.20967 -type d -exec chmod o+rx '{}' \

I know the purpose of the find command here. It is searching for the specified directory, checking whether it is indeed a directory and executing the chmod command on that directory. What I cannot figure out is the format of the chmod command here.

I checked man page of chmod but cannot determine the functionality of the above chmod format.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Check the man page for find. the {} \; is specific to the -exec flag for find

The > prompt appeared because you missed a ‘;’ at the end of ‘\;’

find ~/dev/tools/flex-4.5.0.20967 -type d -exec chmod o+rx '{}' \;

The command finds all sub-directories under ~/dev/tools/flex-4.5.0.20967. without the -type d it will also include files under the folder.

The -exec my_command my_args1 my_args2 '{}' \; part specifies for each matched result by find , execute the command my_command as :

my_command my_args1 my_args2 matched_result

The {} is replaced with the matched result , in this case a directory, the \; is to indicate the termination of arguments for my_command