find: missing argument to -exec with ssh

Trying to remove directories from server:

ssh myname@servera ssh othername@serverb find /var/lib/jenkins/some/path/to/check -name 2.2.4* -type d -exec rm -r {} ;

I tried with ; and ;; and ; and "{}" and -exec sh -c 'rm -r "{}"' ;

All get’s the error find: missing argument to "-exec'"

Thanks

Answer

Directly running commands with ssh is often hard to impossible when you want to use special characters. This is because ssh remotely calls sh -c "<<COMMAND HERE>>". This causes the characters to be quoted / unquoted twice and sometimes even removed.

Your best option is to create a tempfile with your command on the remote system and execute it:

echo 'find /var/lib/jenkins/some/path/to/check -name 2.2.4* -type d -exec rm -r {} ;' > script
scp script myname@servera:
ssh myname@servera bash script

In your case, you may use find’s -delete command instead of -exec.