I have the following script I made from looking at Execute command on all files in a directory:

find /home/user/test/* -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.conf' -exec /home/user/program --config "{}" \;

I have a bunch of .conf files in /home/user/test/ and I would like the program to run on all of these at once. The program is to simulate network traffic so runs constantly until stopped using Ctrl C.

If I manually open new screen sessions and run the command on each of the .conf files separately it works fine however I am trying to figure our a way to only run the command once on all the .conf files.

The script I wrote should apply to all files but it only seems to load just one. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

CodePudding user response：

The program is to simulate network traffic so runs constantly until stopped using Ctrl C.

There's your problem. find does not do parallelism or run anything in the background; it runs the program and waits for it to complete before moving on to the next file.

One option is to invoke the command indirectly through an sh shell command line, which allows you to put it in the background with &:

find ... -exec /bin/sh -c "/home/user/program --config {} &" \;

The drawback is that you'll have to manually find and kill each spawned program if you want to stop them, or use something like killall.

Another option would be GNU parallel, which does give you better control over your jobs.

A third option, if you can modify /home/user/program, is to implement a flag like --background or --daemonize which tells it to go into the background straight after launch.

CodePudding user response：

find looks in all of the paths listed as arguments. Commonly, only one directory is given, but it is valid to specify multiple arguments. For example, find . -print will list all names in and under the current working directory, and find alice bob -print will look in and under alice and bob. If either alice or bob is itself the name of a regular file, that name will simply be printed. In your case, you are using the shell to expand a * glob and executing find on all of the names that match the glob /home/user/test/*. That glob does not match any names in which the final component starts with . (aka, "dotfiles" or "hidden files"), so you will not see any of those. You want to omit the glob and just give a single path argument to find:

find /home/user/test -maxdepth 1 ...

so that find will look at everything in and under /home/user/test