How to find some files and input them to another program in bash?

Question

I have many files with long names and I want to pass some of them to a program.

find . -name *A*.b

gives me the files I want. Now I want to pass them to another program, something like:

program -input A1.b A87_24.b A22.b

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If they're all in the current directory you can just call the program with the pattern. The shell will expand it and call the program with the matching file names.

program -input *A*.b

If you do indeed want to search recursively through subdirectories, use -exec . And make sure to quote the pattern so the shell doesn't expand it.

find . -name '*A*.b' -exec program -input {} +