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How would one run a specific command for each file that was found by using the find command? For the purpose of the question lets say that I would simply like to delete each file found by find.

Edit: While the following answer explains the general usage case, I should note that deleting files and directories is a special case. Instead of of using the -execdir rm ; construct, just use -delete, as in:

find -iname '*.txt' -delete

This handles a bunch of edge cases you might not think about including what order files and directories need to be deleted to not run into errors. For other use cases...

The best way to handle running commands of results of a find is usually to use the various -exec options to the find command. In particular you should try to use -execdir whenever possible since it runs inside the directory of the file that was found and is generally safer (in the sense of preventing stupid mistakes being disastrous) than other options.

The -exec options are followed by the command you would like to run with denoting the spot where the file found by find should be included and are terminated by either ; to run the command once for each file or + to replace with a list of arguments of all the matches. Note that the semicolon terminator is escaped so that it is not understood by the shell to be a separator leading to a new command.

Lets say you were finding all text files:

find -iname '*.txt' -execdir rm ;

Here is the relevant bit from the find manual (man find):

 -exec command ;
 Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following
 arguments to find are taken to be arguments to the command until
 an argument consisting of ‘;’ is encountered. The string ‘’
 is replaced by the current file name being processed everywhere
 it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just in arguments
 where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these
 constructions might need to be escaped (with a ‘’) or quoted to
 protect them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES sec-
 tion for examples of the use of the -exec option. The specified
 command is run once for each matched file. The command is exe-
 cuted in the starting directory. There are unavoidable secu-
 rity problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should
 use the -execdir option instead.


 -exec command +
 This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on
 the selected files, but the command line is built by appending
 each selected file name at the end; the total number of invoca-
 tions of the command will be much less than the number of
 matched files. The command line is built in much the same way
 that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of ‘’
 is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the
 starting directory.


 -execdir command ;

 -execdir command +
 Like -exec, but the specified command is run from the subdirec-
 tory containing the matched file, which is not normally the
 directory in which you started find. This a much more secure
 method for invoking commands, as it avoids race conditions dur-
 ing resolution of the paths to the matched files. As with the
 -exec action, the ‘+’ form of -execdir will build a command line
 to process more than one matched file, but any given invocation
 of command will only list files that exist in the same subdirec-
 tory. If you use this option, you must ensure that your $PATH
 environment variable does not reference ‘.’; otherwise, an
 attacker can run any commands they like by leaving an appropri-
 ately-named file in a directory in which you will run -execdir.
 The same applies to having entries in $PATH which are empty or
 which are not absolute directory names.

An alternative is to pipe the output and parse it with subsequent commands. The only safe way to do so is to use the -print0 option, which tells find to use a null character as the results delimiter. The receiving commands must have a ability to recognize null delimited input. Example:

find /home/phunehehe -iregex '.*.png$' -print0 | xargs -0 file

Note that the -0 option tells xargs to treat the input as null delimited.

Find has a built in delete command if that is all you need to do.

find . -name "*.txt" -delete

Any .txt file found will be deleted using the command above.

I was searching for an answer to this and I stumbled upon this thread.
The answers gave me and idea on how I could achieve it.
Suppose you want to find the mediainfo of all JPEG files

This would append mediainfo " at the beginning and " at the end of every matched file (To escape special characters as much as possible) , put it to a script and run the script:

find . -name *.jpg | sed -e 's/^/mediainfo "/g;' | sed -e 's/$/"/g;' > foo.sh && sh foo.sh

In case you are worried something can go wrong, you can skip redirecting the output to a file and just see the result in the terminal before running the script.

You can accomplish this using the xargs command. xargs essentially runs a command once for each instruction of its standard input. So, if you need to delete all .jpg files in a directory for example, a quick way on the command line is:

$ find ./ -name "*.jpg" | xargs rm 

You can also use the backtick (above the Tab button) to do this (note that this is the backquote character, not the single quote character):

$ rm `find ./ -name "*.jpg"`

Note that due to the way xargs and shells process their input, the xargs method only works if none of the file names and directory names involved contain whitespace or any of "'; the backquote method only works if none of the file names and directory names involved contain whitespace or any of [?*.