'find -exec' a shell function in Linux

Is there a way to get find to execute a function I define in the shell?

For example:

dosomething () {
  echo "Doing something with $1"
}
find . -exec dosomething {} \;

The result of that is:

find: dosomething: No such file or directory

Is there a way to get find's -exec to see dosomething?

Solution 1:

Since only the shell knows how to run shell functions, you have to run a shell to run a function. You also need to mark your function for export with export -f, otherwise the subshell won't inherit them:

export -f dosomething
find . -exec bash -c 'dosomething "$0"' {} \;

Solution 2:

find . | while read file; do dosomething "$file"; done

Solution 3:

Jac's answer is great, but it has a couple of pitfalls that are easily overcome:

find . -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do dosomething "$file"; done

This uses null as a delimiter instead of a linefeed, so filenames with line feeds will work. It also uses the -r flag which disables backslash escaping, and without it backslashes in filenames won't work. It also clears IFS so that potential trailing white spaces in names are not discarded.