I'm curious why you (or anyone) uses -exec? It's often painfully slower than piping through xargs and I find the syntax (the semicolon and braces and the required quoting/escaping) uncomfortable. I haven't used -exec in 20 years.
find -type f -exec sed -i s/foo/bar/ {} +
Admittedly I wrote that nearly 20 years ago so I guess it doesn't invalidate your point :-)
- There's the issue of command line length, pipe too many files and xargs will just fail.
- There's predictibility. With -exec you get to see the entire command line structure, what is escaped, what is not, what names go where. With xargs, a couple of badly named files and you are out of luck.
- Find's syntax is just more general. Xarg is limited to pushing parameters into a script, while -exec can run whatever scrit you want, with single or multiple parameters, or flags, or whatever.
Performance is almost never an issue.
especially this quote:
> find's business is evaluating expressions -- not locating files. Yes, find certainly locates files; but that's really just a side effect.
I already know how to use it. It works.
> It's often painfully slower than piping through xargs
I've tried it. It has different semantics. First attempt always leads to errors and doing the wrong things. I always have to come up with some workaround to make things work as I expect they would (i.e. how -exec does things by default).
This lack of confidence also means I would never dare using xargs for anything remotely destructive (like rm).
What reason do I have not to use -exec? Why swap a perfectly perfect hammer for a broken screwdriver?
Besides: IMO the timesaving aspects of find is not strictly tied to how fast find runs. It's tied to what I can automate.