What does this command do? find . -name cgi-bin -exec ls -la {} \; 3

[farley99]

find . -name cgi-bin -exec ls -la {} \;

 

[KenCunningham]

Searches from where the command is issued, down the directory tree and displays an ls -la of all files foiund called cgi-bin. It might be an idea to enclose the cgi-bin in single quotes to obviate any problem with the hyphen. HTH.

 

[farley99]

What does this mean? -exec ?

 

[edemiere]

farley99

It will 'execute' the command following it, which in this case is an ls -la

Cheers!

 

[tobiasly]

The 'find' command is a very powerful command that searches entire directory trees for files meeting certain criteria. It can search on name, size, modification date, contents, etc. Type 'man find' for more info.

The . is the starting point. A single dot in Linux means the current directory.

The '-name' means to search based on name, as opposed to all the other criteria that can be searched.

The 'cgi-bin' is a parameter to the '-name' criteria. That is the name being looked for. You can use wildcards as well, as long as you include the entire parameter in quotes, such as: find . -name '*.cgi'

Normally, 'find' will simply print a name of matching filesor directories. But if you include the '-exec', it means to execute the following command for each file found instead.

Everything after '-exec' is the command to be executed, where the '{}' curly braces will be replaced by the name of each file.

 

[bluegroper]

$ locate cgi-bin
does much the same job, in a fraction of the time because it uses the locatedb database rather than slooowly searching thru every single directory.
Try it.

 

[ThJ]

yes locate is very fast ... if the file's path is already stored in locatedb.
If you are trying to locate a "new" file this db isn't updated and there is no result even if the file is there.
I guess the update is run once a day, but you can force the update with the updatedb command.