You just can't use if
inside of an -exec
action of find
command in the way you may wish. This because of the following reasons:
- The
-exec
action expects a command. This is from man find
(somewhere at the line 697 in my terminal):
-exec command ;
Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following
arguments to find are taken to be arguments to the command until
an argument consisting of `;' is encountered. The string `{}'
is replaced by the current file name being processed everywhere
it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just in arguments
where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these
constructions might need to be escaped (with a `\') or quoted to
protect them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES sec‐
tion for examples of the use of the -exec option. The specified
command is run once for each matched file. The command is exe‐
cuted in the starting directory. There are unavoidable secu‐
rity problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should
use the -execdir option instead.
-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on
the selected files, but the command line is built by appending
each selected file name at the end; the total number of invoca‐
tions of the command will be much less than the number of
matched files. The command line is built in much the same way
that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of `{}'
is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the
starting directory.
if
is not a command as you mat think, but a shell keyword. See the output of type if
command.
Now, to accomplish what you wish, you don't really need to use if
inside of -exec
. Just make the test inside of -exec
, then use -print
(see man find
for more info):
find . -name '*.text' -exec $SHELL -c '[ ! -f ${1%.*} ]' $SHELL '{}' ';' -print
Another way would be to use a bash script, as follow:
find . -name '*.text' -exec my_if {} \;
where cat ~/bin/my_if
gives the following output in my case:
#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -f $(basename -s .text "$1") ]; then echo "$1"; fi
Finally, I think that all the normal people using bash would use:
for f in *.text; do if [ ! -f $(basename -s .text "$f") ]; then echo "$f"; fi; done
-depth
to ensure that files are removed before their directories are. – glenn jackman Jan 13 '15 at 19:39