find matches several thousand files and each must be passed to gzip. You want find to pack as many path names as possible into each gzip invocation instead of starting one process per file. Which action does that?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 104. Devices, Linux filesystems, filesystem hierarchy standard hard
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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Not correct -exec gzip {} \;
Wrong for the requirement. The semicolon terminator runs the command once per matched file, which is correct but starts thousands of processes.
Correct -exec gzip {} +
Correct. The plus terminator appends as many matched path names as fit onto a single command line, so gzip is invoked a handful of times in total.
Not correct -ok gzip {} \;
Wrong. -ok is -exec with a confirmation prompt on standard error before each run, so it is both per-file and interactive.
Not correct -execdir gzip {} \;
Wrong for the requirement. -execdir runs the command from the directory holding the match, which avoids some race conditions, but the semicolon form is still one process per file.
Why
The terminator, not the command, decides the batching. A literal semicolon (escaped as \; or quoted, so the shell does not eat it) means one invocation per match, and {} may appear anywhere in the command. A plus means aggregate: {} must be the last argument, and find builds command lines up to the system's argument-length limit, in the same manner as xargs. -execdir exists in both forms and differs only in the working directory it uses.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page find(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 104 and space the ones you get wrong.
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