Bash, find, exec and echo

Question

find . \ -name 'user_prefs' \ -exec echo "whitelist_from [e-mail]" >> {} \;' 

I would like to add the line whitelist_from [e-mail] to all the files found by find , but my command does not work. It just creates the file '{}'.

Shoud do I use the for command?

thanks!

Answer 1

You need to exit "→", for example, like this:

 find . -name 'user_prefs' -exec sh -c 'echo "whitelist_from [e-mail]" >> {}' \; 

Answer 2

As already mentioned, using xargs is recommended, but you can also avoid running sh many times:

 find . -name 'user_prefs' | while read filename; do echo "whitelist_from [e-mail]" >>"$filename"; done