Question

I have the following command

find . -name "*.tiff" -exec echo `basename -s .tiff {}` \;

I expect this to print all my .tiff-files without their file extensions. What I get is

./file1.tiff
./file2.tiff
...

The command,

find . -name "*.tiff" -exec basename -s .tiff {} \;

does yield

file1
file2
...

Is this not supposed to be the input of echo?

Answer 1

The content of the backticks is executed before the find command – yielding just the placeholder {}, which is used in the find command line – hence your result. You can always use set -x to examine what the shell is up to.