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Bash script not handling spaces in file names correctly when using find and exec

👀 Views: 1499 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-14
bash find scripts

Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy. I'm currently working on a bash script that needs to process a number of text files located in a directory. The scenario I'm working with is that some of these files have spaces in their names, and the way I'm using `find` with `-exec` doesn't seem to handle them correctly, causing the script to unexpected result. I'm using the following command to search for `.txt` files and pass them to another command: ```bash find /path/to/directory -name "*.txt" -exec cat {} \; ``` However, when it encounters a file like `my file.txt`, it throws an behavior because it's interpreting the space as a separator. I've tried to wrap the `{}` placeholder in double quotes like this: ```bash find /path/to/directory -name "*.txt" -exec cat "{}" \; ``` This didn't help either; I still receive errors if the filenames contain spaces. I've also considered using `xargs`, but I'm not sure if that would resolve the scenario. Can anyone suggest a solution to properly handle filenames with spaces when using `find` and `-exec`? I'm running this script in Bash 5.1 on Ubuntu 20.04. Any help would be appreciated! My development environment is Linux.