The backslash before the semicolon is used, because ;
is one of list operators (or &&
, ||
) for separating shell commands. In example:
command1; command2
The find
utility is using ;
or +
to terminate the shell commands invoked by -exec
.
So to avoid special shell characters from interpretation, they need to be escaped with a backslash to remove any special meaning for the next character read and for line continuation.
Therefore the following example syntax is allowed for find
command:
find . -exec echo {} \;
find . -exec echo {} ';'
find . -exec echo {} ";"
find . -exec echo {} \+
find . -exec echo {} +
See also: