Find and -exec with backticks like `... {}`

In this article I'll explain the reason for the following rule.

Rule:
You can't use backticks in a find's exec.

First of all in order to have a working example I created a subdir with a couple of more subdirs in it and the following find statement lists all subdirs named 'dd'.

mkdir -p aa/dd aa/bb/dd aa/cc/dd
find aa -name dd
aa/bb/dd
aa/cc/dd
aa/dd

A slightly more complex use of find is something like

find aa -name dd -exec dirname {} \;

which lists all directories which contain a 'dd' subdir or file

aa
aa/bb
aa/cc

My naive knowledge of find led me to believe that an equivalent command is

find aa -name dd -exec echo `dirname {}` \;

Very wrong. Here is the result:

.
.
.

So obviously '{}' is not supplied to 'dirname' as expected and none of the directory names is printed,

A little googling in comp.unix.shell revealed that I hadn't understood how 'exec' is invoked.
You cannot use any shell-type substitution or redirection in the 'exec' clause since 'exec'
executes the 'exec()' system call.

A hacker's way of doing it is to invoke another shell in the 'exec' clause.
Since the shell does not know about the '{}' parameter it has to be supplied as a positional parameter in a rather tricky way:

find aa -name dd -exec /bin/sh -c 'echo `dirname {}`' \;

does not work.

find aa -name dd -exec /bin/sh -c 'echo `dirname $0`' {} \;

works as expected but note that '{}' is seen as argument $0.

And with csh instead of sh you'll have to change the arg number to $1:

find aa -name dd -exec /bin/csh -c 'echo `dirname $1`' {} \;

Originally this problem came up when I wanted to rename all subdirs of a certain name to something else so

find aa -name dd -exec mv {} `dirname {}`/zz \;

would have been nice and short but it doesn't work.

find aa -name dd -exec /bin/sh -c 'mv $0 `dirname $0`/zz' {} \;

does it now for me.

Solutions with 'xargs'

Here is an invocation with 'xargs' (note that '-i' provides individual args (as {}) rather than one long arg list):

find aa -name dd -exec dirname {} \; | xargs -i mv {}/dd {}/zz

The general problem is that I need a 'dirname' to get the parent dir and I need a 'mv' to rename the dir.
Putting all of this into the 'xargs' section also means that I have to invoke another shell e.g.

find aa -name dd | xargs -i /bin/sh -c 'mv $1 `dirname $1`/zz' {} {}

which is of similar complexity than the 'find-only' solution.

Simpler but one more in the pipeline:

find aa -name dd | xargs -i dirname {} | xargs -i mv {}/dd {}/zz