How to open multiple files from `find` output?

Question

I know I can open multiple files found in a dir like so:

find -name *.foo -xargs <command> {} \;

This works, but when trying to open a bunch of textfiles in gedit at the same time, it opens them successively (when one files is closed, the next one is opened).

I would like to open all of those files at the same time. How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

To act on multiple files at once with find, use + instead of \;:

find . -name '*.foo' -exec gedit {} +

With zsh, or with bash ≥4 if you put shopt -s globstar in your ~/.bashrc, you can use **/ to recurse into subdirectories:

gedit **/*.foo

Zsh also has many glob qualifiers which can replace most uses of find.

Answer 2

I think that in this case you could use

find ./ -name \*.foo | xargs gedit