When sysadminning, you sometimes want to run find on a remote machine with fancy stuff like -exec. This should be easy (once you get the find syntax right), but typically, incorrect quoting gives you errors such as

find: incomplete statement or Argument for -c ends in backslash. Here's an example of how to do it with some Perl variable substitutions thrown in. Nothing Earth-shattering, but if it saves someone five minutes, it's worth posting.

# in my actual code, I had "rm" instead of "ls -l", but I figured this
+ would be safer in an example.
system "/usr/local/bin/ssh $remote \"find $base_dir -mtime +$days -exe
+c ls -l \\{} \\;\"" and
        warn "system: ssh: $!";

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In reply to Run system find -exec on remote machine by gaal

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