redirecting output of 'find' command to 'vim'

Question

I am doing a find $PWD -name 'filename' | vim -

expecting the file filename to be opened in vim editor. but it is not working. In this case, I am sure that there exists just one file with name 'filename'.

Also the result of find gives the complete path on stdout.

Answer 1

vim "$(find "$PWD" -name 'filename')"

or

find "$PWD" -name 'filename' -exec vim {} \;

(You can drop "$PWD", by the way. find starts the search from current directory by default.)

Answer 2

find . -name 'filename' -print0 | xargs -0 vim

should also work. You might want to read up on xargs, which is a handy thing to know about.

Answer 3

Mentioned in @idbrii's comment, but my favorite is:

find . -name 'filename' -type f -exec vim {} \+

This opens up each file found in its own buffer ready to be navigated with :next and :prev. Tested on OSX, but I'm fairly certain it will work on Linux too.