Question

I’m writing a deploy script, and I need to run a less compiler against all .less files in a directory. This is easy to do with the following find command:

find -name "*.less" -exec plessc {} {}.css \;

After running this command on a folder with a file named main.less, I’m left with a file named main.less.css, but I want it to be main.css.

I know I can easily strip the .less portion of the resulting files with this command: rename 's/\.less//' *.css but I’m hoping to learn something new about using -exec.

Is it possible to modify the name of the file that matches while using it in the -exec parameter?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Your find command is using a couple of non standard GNU extensions:

• You do not state where to find, this is an error in POSIX but GNU find select the current directory in that case
• You use a non isolated {}, POSIX find doesn’t expand it in that case.

Here is a one liner that should work with most find implementations and fix your double extension issue:

find . -name "*.less" -exec sh -c "plessc \$0 \$(dirname \$0)/\$(basename \$0 less)css" {} \;

On Solaris 10 and older, sh -c should be replaced by ksh -c if the PATH isn’t POSIX compliant.