understanding some flags in find-command in linux

Question

I wanted to move only files in Linux and I found the answer here as the following:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec mv {} destination_path \;

which worked for me perfectly. But my questions are:

1. what is the meaning of \; in this command?

2. Are the curly bracket {} in this command equivalent to *?

Answer 1

The find command assumes that everything between the -exec option and a ; character comprises the command that you want to execute on each search result.

Because ; is a reserved character in the bash shell, you have to escape it using \, otherwise bash will interpret it. See man bash for details.

The curly brackets {} are a placeholder for each search result of find.

The following is from the man-page of find:

-exec command ;
   Execute command; true if 0 status is returned.
   All following arguments to find are taken to  be arguments 
   to the command until an argument consisting of `;' is encountered.
   The string `{}' is replaced by the current file name being
   processed everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the command, not
   just in arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find.
   Both of these constructions might need to be escaped (with a
   `\') or quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell.