Question

The find command seems to differ from other Unix commands.

Why is there the empty curly brackets and a backward flash at the end of the following command?

find * -perm 777 -exec chmod 770 {} \; 

I found one reason for the curly brackets but not for the backward flash.

The curly brackets are apparently for the path

Same as -exec, except that “{}” is replaced with as many pathnames as possible for each invocation of utility

Answer 1

I’d recommend that you instead do that as

find . -perm 777 -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 770 

‘xargs’ says to take the results of the find and feed it 20 at a time to the following command.