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While using fish as my shell, i'm trying to set permissions on a bunch of c source files in current dir with
find . -type f -name "*.c" -exec chmod 644 {} +;
I get an error
find: missing argument to `-exec'
or
find . -type f -name "*.c" -exec chmod 644 {} \;
I get an error
chmod: cannot access '': No such file or directory
What's wrong?
fish happens to be one of the few shells where that {} needs to be quoted.
So, with that shell, you need:
find . -type f -name '*.c' -exec chmod 644 '{}' +
When not quoted, {} expands to an empty argument, so the command becomes the same as:
find . -type f -name '*.c' -exec chmod 644 '' +
And find complains about the missing {} (or ; as + is only recognised as the -exec terminator when following {}).
With most other shells, you don't need the quotes around {}.
{ and } have special meanings in fish. They need to be escaped in order to work with find, for example:
find . -type f -name "*.c" -exec chmod 644 \{\} \;
Or you would have to quote {} like,
find . -type f -name "*.c" -exec chmod 644 '{}' \;
Your examples miss the expected trailing semicolon:
find . -type f -name "*.c" -exec chmod 644 {} \;
After revising the question, it is "fish" shell. This is a known issue which can be worked around using quoting as @rahul noticed. However, the escaping suggested does not work for my configuration: single quoting does:
find . -type f -name "*.c" -exec chmod 644 '{}' \;
find . -type f -name "*.c" -exec chmod 644 '{}' +
What does happen (if one types the characters rather than cut/paste) is that on trying to edit the command-line to escape the curly braces, fish gets confused and cannot proceed. Here's a screenshot just after inserting the backslashes (no point in trying to cut/paste that):
and then pressing return:
So no, fish doesn't really work with escaped curly braces. It only pretends to do that. Continuing to press enter gives a conclusive demo:
Further reading:
fish is pre-interpreting the find command (and only knows about the second case). I'll take a quick look for source to clarify this.
Aug 4, 2016 at 9:18
{}with"{}"or'{}'i.e.find . -type f -name "*.c" -exec chmod 644 '{}' +;after+?;, ie..... chmod 644 {} +. Then Thomas Dickey posted his answer, then the OP edited to add the;as you see it now. I know that still doesn't explain properly why the OP did it though...+;looks someone mixed up things from find's man page.bashandfisheat it before passing the arguments tofind