find: missing argument to -exec

Question

I was helped out today with a command, but it doesn\'t seem to be working. This is the command:

find /home/me/download/ -type f -name \"*.rm\" -exec ffmpeg -         


        

Answer 1

You need to do some escaping I think.

find /home/me/download/ -type f -name "*.rm" -exec ffmpeg -i {} \-sameq {}.mp3 \&\& rm {}\;

Answer 2

Just in case anyone sees a similar "missing -exec args" in Amazon Opsworks Chef bash scripts, I needed to add another backslash to escape the \;

bash 'remove_wars' do
  user 'ubuntu'
  cwd '/'
  code <<-EOH
    find /home/ubuntu/wars -type f -name "*.war" -exec rm {} \\;
  EOH
  ignore_failure true
end

Answer 3

Also, if anyone else has the "find: missing argument to -exec" this might help:

In some shells you don't need to do the escaping, i.e. you don't need the "\" in front of the ";".

find <file path> -name "myFile.*" -exec rm - f {} ;

Answer 4

Both {} and && will cause problems due to being expanded by the command line. I would suggest trying:

find /home/me/download/ -type f -name "*.rm" -exec ffmpeg -i \{} -sameq \{}.mp3 \; -exec rm \{} \;

Answer 5

Just for your information:
I have just tried using "find -exec" command on a Cygwin system (UNIX emulated on Windows), and there it seems that the backslash before the semicolon must be removed:
find ./ -name "blabla" -exec wc -l {} ;

Answer 6

I figured it out now. When you need to run two commands in exec in a find you need to actually have two separate execs. This finally worked for me.

find . -type f -name "*.rm" -exec ffmpeg -i {} -sameq {}.mp3 \; -exec rm {} \;