Question

I want to find files and save the file name to a variable and use this variable in -exec in order to do some calculations with it

so for example every time the find returns a file name I use that file name in -exec in order to produce something else at the same time find command finds this file

thanks

Answer 1

Then don’t exec.

find -whatever |
while read filename; do
    Whatever you did in -exec before "$filename"
    Other thing "$filename"
done

This is not robust with file names containing special characters, though.

Edit: If you want to do multiple things to the hits returned by find, this is certainly possible with find -exec or xargs as well:

find -whatever -exec sh -c 'whatever you did in -exec before {}; other thing {}' \;

Or you can mangle the output into a shell script and feed it to sh:

find -whatever -printf 'mv %p destdir; ln -s destdir/%f %h\n' | sh

But if you really, truly want the action to happen as soon as find learns about the file, -exec is probably the way to go. (I’m not clear on under what circumstances this would be a useful requirement. Perhaps you can explain what you want to achieve?)

If you want to keep the list of hits returned by find so you can do additional things after find finishes, make it output the hits like in the last example, and store the output in a file or pipe it to another command like in the first example.