Use current filename (“{}”) multiple times in “find -exec”?

Question

Many sources say that every instance of {} will be replaced with the filename found through find, but when I try to run the following, I only get one text file and its name

Answer 1

To deal with the caveats that William Pursell mentioned in his answer, use the following:

find /directory -name "*pattern*" -exec sh -c 'cut -f8 "$1" > "$1.txt"' x {} \;

When you use sh -c, it gets the positional parameters from arguments following the string to execute. The extra x fills in $0, and the substituted filename will become $1.

The double quotes allow this to work properly with filenames containing spaces and other special characters.