find . -exec echo {} \; = missing argument to `-exec'

Question

Why doesn't this work? (echo is not the real command)

$ find . -type d -exec echo {} \;
find: missing argument to `-exec'

I managed to do that anyway like this:

$ for f in `find . -type d`; do echo $f; done

Answer 1

This work for me.

find . -type f -exec file '{}' \;

Braces are enclosed in single quote marks to protect them from interpretation as shell script punctuation.