Question

I would like to do something like:

find . -iname "*Advanced*Linux*Program*" -exec kpdf {} & \;

Possible? Some other comparable method available?

Answer 1

Firstly, it won’t work as you’ve typed, because the shell will interpret it as

find . -iname "*Advanced*Linux*Program*" -exec kpdf {} &
\;

which is an invalid find run in the background, followed by a command that doesn’t exist.

Even escaping it doesn’t work, since find -exec actually execs the argument list given, instead of giving it to a shell (which is what actually handles & for backgrounding).

Once you know that that‘s the problem, all you have to do is start a shell to give these commands to:

find . -iname "*Advanced*Linux*Program*" -exec sh -c '"$0" "$@" &' kpdf {} \;

---

On the other hand, given what you’re trying to do, I would suggest one of

find ... -exec kfmclient exec {} \;  # KDE
find ... -exec gnome-open {} \;      # Gnome
find ... -exec xdg-open {} \;        # any modern desktop

which will open the file in the default program as associated by your desktop environment.