mac os find command no terminating character

Question

In my git project I need to remove all files ending with **.pyc. I therefore run the below command, but got this error of no terminating ";" that I do not understand what it means.

find . -name "**.pyc" -exec git rm {};
find: -exec: no terminating ";" or "+"

If I just run find . -name "**.pyc" I get a list of all files of format .pyc.

Answer 1

When you execute find . -name "**.pyc" -exec git rm {};, the shell reads the ; as a terminating character and executes the command find . -name "**.pyc" -exec git rm {}. But this is an error, because find expects the -exec command to be terminated by a ;. That is, you need to pass ; as one of the arguments to find. You accomplish that by escaping it to the shell, either with find . -name "**.pyc" -exec git rm {} \; or find . -name "**.pyc" -exec git rm {} ";" Another option is to terminate the -exec with +, which will invoke git rm with more than one argument, resulting in fewer invocations of git. This is slightly more convenient, since + does not need to be escaped.