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Saxtheowl
Asked: 2020-09-20 04:53:17 +0800 CST

Why does my find command get executed two times?

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I want to retrieve specific files then cp the result into another directory. It is all working, but my command seems to be executed a second time.

For example, I have a file a and I want to cp it into subdirectory test/, so I run:

find . -mtime -1 -name a -exec cp {} test/ ';'

My file is copied into the subdirectory as I wanted but then I get this error message:

cp: './test/a' and 'test/a' are the same file
command-line bash files find

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You have a race condition - first find finds ./a and copies it to test/a, then it finds the newly copied ./test/a and tries to copy it again:

    $ find . -mtime -1 -name a -print -exec cp -v {} test/ ';'
./a
'./a' -> 'test/a'
./test/a
cp: './test/a' and 'test/a' are the same file

    You could avoid that by telling find not to descend into the target directory ex.

    find . -path ./test -prune -o -mtime -1 -name a -exec cp {} test/ ';'
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