How to recursively set directory permissions with a find that lacks -exec?

My Qnap NAS is cursed with a find command that lacks the -exec parameter, so I have to pipe to something. The shell is: GNU bash, version 3.2.57(2)-release-(arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf) I'm trying to set the setgid bit on all subdirectories (not files) of the current directory. This does not work: find . -type d | xargs chmod g+s $1 Using "$1", "$(1)", $("1") etc. will not work either. They all indicate that chmod is getting passed a directory name containing spaces as two or more parameters (it spits out its standard help message about what parameters are supported). I don't care to use xargs if I don't have to; I think it chokes on long names anyway, doesn't it? These and variants of them do not work: find . -type d | chmod g+s find . -type d | chmod g+s "$1" I've thought of using awk or sed to inject quotation marks but I have to think there's an easier way to do this. What did people do before -exec? (The sad thing is that I probably knew, back in 1995 or so, but have long since forgotten.) PS: Various of these directory names will contain Unicode characters, the ? symbol, etc. They're originally from macOS which is rather permissive. That said, I should probably replace all the ? instances with something like the Unicode character ⁇ so Windows doesn't choke on them. But that's also going to require a similar find operation with this crippleware version of find.