-exec command {} \;

• Execute command after find. To pass results of find use {}.
• You must put a blank before "\;". If a blank is missing, an error occurrs like below.

  $ find . -name *~ -exec rm {}\;
  find: missing argument to `-exec'
  

  $ find . -name *~ -exec rm {}\;
  find: -exec: no terminating ";" or "+"
  

• To execute more than one command, specify multiple -exec.

Example:

find ~ -name '*bak' -exec rm {} \;

• In above example, "rm {} \;" following "-exec" is the command to execute. Last ";" denotes the end of the parameters. "\" before ";" is needed to escape "\" so that shell does not evaluate ";".

Example:

Delete all files whose name are *~ (Emacs backup file) in home directory.

$ find ~/ -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;

Delete all .svn directories from working directory tree of Subversion.

find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

Grep files in directory tree.
（grep option -H for printing filename headers, -n for printing line number）

find <directory> -type f -exec grep -nH <pattern> {} \;