How do I use a pipe in the exec parameter for a find command?

Question

I'm trying to construct a find command to process a bunch of files in a directory using two different executables. Unfortunately, -exec on find doesn't allow to use pipe or even \| because the shell interprets that character first.

Here is specifically what I'm trying to do (which doesn't work because pipe ends the find command):

find /path/to/jpgs -type f -exec jhead -v {} | grep 123 \; -print 

Answer 1

Try this

find /path/to/jpgs -type f -exec sh -c 'jhead -v {} | grep 123' \; -print 

Alternatively you could try to embed your exec statement inside a sh script and then do:

find -exec some_script {} \; 

Answer 2

A slightly different approach would be to use xargs:

find /path/to/jpgs -type f -print0 | xargs -0 jhead -v | grep 123 

which I always found a bit easier to understand and to adapt (the -print0 and -0 arguments are necessary to cope with filenames containing blanks)

This might (not tested) be more effective than using -exec because it will pipe the list of files to xargs and xargs makes sure that the jhead commandline does not get too long.