[i15e]

Your original command should work fine.

find does not pass arguments through an intermediate shell, so there are no quoting concerns with regard to spaces in filenames, etc.

And with the form of -exec terminated by a ; it runs a single command for each matching filesystem entry, so there will be no issues with exceeding the maximum argument size.

You can verify via strace:

  $ touch 'a b.md' 'c d.md'
  $ strace -fe execve find . -iname '*.md' -exec unbuffer ls {} \;

At the end of the exec chains you should see the following:

  execve("/bin/ls", ["ls", "./c d.md"] ...
  execve("/bin/ls", ["ls", "./a b.md"] ...

The filenames are being passed through spaces and all.

However if this were a real scenario, a better solution might be:

  find . -iname '*.md' -exec unbuffer ls -1 {} +

(Look up the -1 flag for ls, and the + variant of -exec for find for details)

[pxc]

This is a great reply! Makes me weirdly glad that I posted further mistakes about my earlier ones. :)