Follow-up Comment #3, bug #18554 (project findutils): OK, I have now spent some time re-reading the standard at http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/find.html.
The last thing before the "+" must be {}. That {} will be replaced by an aggregated set of pathnames. Hence there is no possibility to support something like "find . -exec foo {} bar +" while conforming to the standard. This begs the question as to whether something like "find a b -exec echo {} MARK {} +" should work, and if so how. The standard states "If more than one argument containing only the two characters "{}" is present, the behavior is unspecified.". So anything could happen, really. What happens is that find issues an error message complaining of inappropriate usage and exits without doing anything. So the result is that find supports "find .... -exec .... {} +" but the final + must be immediately preceded by {}. While find could support a {} earlier in the command line, it doesn't currently support that, thet feature would not be useful to you as far as I can see, and the standard allows the current behaviour. So, I think POSIX disallows the usage you would like, and the closest conforming usage pattern that find could support doesn't appear to help you. As far as I understand things though you want to be able to do something like this: find startpoint -tests ... -exec rsync {} /dest + The closest thing I can think of to what you want is this: find a b -print0 | rsync --files-from=- --from0 /dest Some versions of xargs support the use of both -I and -L in such a way that {} can expand to more than one filename. GNU findutils doesn't support that. That construct could perhaps be used to do what you want. I suggest you join the findutils mailing list and start a discussion about what printf "funny\nscary\n" | xargs -I _ -L10 echo hello _ world should do. On other words, should -L reverse the effect of -I? Please join the list before sending the mail, or you may miss some of the responses. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?18554> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/ _______________________________________________ Bug-findutils mailing list Bug-findutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils