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find.md

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find: Locate a file in a directory tree

The find command is useful for searching for a file when you do not know where in the directory it is located. To search the format for the command is:

find directory-name commandlist

The most common but hardly exhaustive comandlist arguments that your instructor uses are:

  • -name filename : Look for files with that name
  • -user username : Look for files owned by that user
  • -perm permission : Look for files with a certain permission
  • -atime days : Look for files accessed within a certain number of days
  • -mtime days : Look for files modified withing a certain number of days
  • -size blocks : File size of 512 byte blocks
  • -a : And two conditions
  • -o : Or two conditions

Once the file is located one can either:

  • -print: Print full pathname when the file is found
  • -exec command: Execute a Unix command on that file. The end of the command is marked with a ";" The brackets "{ }" are replaced by the name of the file.

To list all files greater that 51200 bytes in the data_files directory:

find ~/cli_workshop/data_files/ -size +100 -print

We can run the same command but instead of printing execute ls -lF on all files:

find ~/cli_workshop/data_files/ -size +100 ls -lF "{}" ";"

Some symbols, such as ";", "(", ")", and "*", are needed for find, and must be put in quotes. If they are not put in double quotes, the shell will interpret them instead of the find command.

To remove all files in my home directory that have "core dumped"

find ~ -name core -exec rm "{ }" ";"

To use the -o and -a flags, the conditions must be in parentheses. To remove all files in my home directory named a.out or core that haven't been accessed within 10 days:

find ~ "(" -name a.out -o -name core ")" -atime +10 exec rm "{ }" ";"

More examples:

find --help
find ~ -name "*.csv" -type f
find ~ -type f -not -name libraryfines.csv
find ~ -name "cli_workshop" type -d

Find uses up quite a bit of memory and CPU if you traverse outside your home directory. There's other tools that help with this which we will meet later.

A reimplementation of find is fd-find which can be installed by doing this:

sudo apt install fd-find