I am trying to write a bash script performing to find and pull somewhere else a specific file type. So far, I came up with the following script:
find ./to_compress -type f -iname "*.tar" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec mv {} ./compressed/${{}##*/}
However the bash complains that ${{}##*/} is a bad substitution
bash: ./compressed/${{}##*/}: bad substitution
Some googling around suggested that it could due to -exec calling dash instead of bash, which I checked for with
find ./to_compress -type f -iname "*.tar" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec echo $0 {} ;
which responded with bin/bash xxxx, suggesting that bash was indeed called by the exec command.
What could this error be due to? How could I mediate it to get to the filename alone and remove the trailing directories?
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Answer
The {} placeholder of the -exec flag of the find command is not a variable.
You can only perform parameter expansion on variables.
The problem has nothing to with the shell being dash or bash.
In this situation what you can do is run a sh with -exec,
and pass the {} as a parameter to the sub-shell, like this:
find ... -exec bash -c 'mv "$1" "./compressed/${1##*/}"' -- {} ;