[ILUG] Disadvantages of find -exec?

[Pádraig Brady]

Braun Brelin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> A few days ago I saw a thread regarding find where someone stated that using
> find with -exec was a bad idea and to use -xargs instead.
> Can someone give me some opinions as to what specifically is the drawback of
> -exec with find?  Just curious.

Note there are actually 2 `find -exec` variants.

find -exec command {} ';'
find -exec command {} '+'

The later is new and specified by POSIX, and
is equivalent to `find -print0 | xargs -r0`

Starting a process per file is generally _very_ inefficient,
so it's always best to use xargs or the new '+' variant.

Pádraig.