Question

I think this is gonna close to work

find /mydirectory -name '*'  | xargs echo abc >

But I got:

find: paths must precede expression: b

Need a little help 🙂
thanks

Answer 1

Try this

find . -type f -exec sh -c 'echo "abc" >> ${1}' _ "{}" \;

Or if you want to do it in bulk:

find . -type f -exec sh -c 'for f; do echo "abc" >> $f; done' _ "{}" +

If you need explanations, ask.

This page is a good guide on how to use find.

In both commands, the _ and {} are passed as arguments to the sh command. Because $0 isn’t fully reliable to use (see the linked page), a dummy variable _ is passed to it.

Find puts its matches in {}, which is expanded. So if the command matches a file a, then {} is expanded to a in the first command.

In the first command, the command you are passing to exec is terminated with ;, but ; is special to the shell, so you escape it.

The second command runs as a bulk operation, so if find matches a, b, and c (etc.), the {} is expanded to all three and passed in.

Thus, you need a for f in the second command, which defaults to for f in $@, which will be your a, b, and c (and this can be tested by doing ${1}, ${2}, ${3}…).