Previous: Multiple Files, Up: Run Commands
To ask the user whether to execute a command on a single file, you can
use the find primary ‘-okdir’ instead of ‘-execdir’,
and the find primary ‘-ok’ instead of ‘-exec’:
Like ‘-execdir’ (see Single File), but ask the user first (on the standard input); if the response does not start with ‘y’ or ‘Y’, do not run the command, and return false. If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from /dev/null.
This insecure variant of the ‘-okdir’ action is specified by POSIX. The main difference is that the command is executed in the directory from which
findwas invoked, meaning that ‘{}’ is expanded to a relative path starting with the name of one of the starting directories, rather than just the basename of the matched file. If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from /dev/null.
When processing multiple files with a single command, to query the
user you give xargs the following option. When using this
option, you might find it useful to control the number of files
processed per invocation of the command (see Limiting Command Size).
--interactive-p