find: missing argument to `-exec error

Asked Oct 11 '22 at 19:46

Active Oct 11 '22 at 19:53

Viewed 58 times

I have a couple of commands that allow me to create a .tar archive and then extract the files from it.

I am using WSL and both commands work just fine if I enter them directly, but not if I run them as a .sh file - I get the find: missing argument to `-exec' error.

To create the .tar, I have:

find . -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type d -exec tar cvf {}.tar {} \;

And to extract files I have:

find . -name "*.tar" -exec tar xf {} \;

Where am I going wrong?

edited Oct 11 '22 at 19:53

Kusalananda

333,661

asked Oct 11 '22 at 19:46

jim_e_jib

3

Please check if you have maybe windows line endings in your .sh files and if so, use dos2unix to convert them to unix line endings. – pLumo Oct 11 '22 at 19:53
1

Hi, thanks for the info - running dos2unix on the .sh file (thanks for the tip!) has fixed this.
Thanks ever so much!
– jim_e_jib Oct 11 '22 at 21:15
1

Creating a tar archive of a single file is pointless; you are only adding overhead, – tripleee Oct 12 '22 at 04:16
Hi triplee, thanks for the comments. I'm creating a tar archive of directories containing thousands, sometimes tens of thousand of files. Thanks for the link, it's interesting reading. @pLumo gave me the fix for my problem. – jim_e_jib Oct 12 '22 at 07:16
@jim_e_jib Great that this fixed the issue. Next time, you can create your files directly with Linux Line Endings, any proper Editor should be able to do that, e.g. see here for notepad++. – pLumo Oct 12 '22 at 07:31
I can't see a thumbs up option for comments - thanks for the tip, I didn't realised notepad++ could do that :-) – jim_e_jib Oct 12 '22 at 12:55

find: missing argument to `-exec error

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