For the EP by Hidden in Plain View, see Find (EP)

The find program is a search utility, mostly found on Unix-like platforms. It searches through a directory tree of a filesystem, locating files based on some user-specified criteria. By default, find returns all files below the current working directory. Further, find allows the user to specify an action to be taken on each matched file. Thus, it is extremely powerful program for applying actions to many files. It also supports regexp matching.

Examples

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From current directory

find . -name my\* This searches in the current directory (represented by a period) and below it, for files and directories with names starting with my. The backslash before the star is needed to avoid the shell expansion. Without the backslash, the shell would replace my* with the list of files whose names begin with my in the current directory. An alternative is to enclose the the arguments in quotes: find . -name "my*"

Files only

find . -name "my*" -type f This limits the results of the above search to only regular files, therefore excluding directories, special files, pipes, symbolic links, etc. my* is enclosed in quotes as otherwise the shell would replace it with the list of files in the current directory starting with my

Commands

The previous examples created listings of results because, by default, find executes the '-print' action.

find . -name "my*" -type f -ls This prints an extended file information.

Search all directories

find / -name "myfile" -type f -print This searches every file on the computer for a file with the name myfile. It is generally not a good idea to look for data files this way. This can take a considerable amount of time, so it is best to specify the directory more precisely.

Specify a directory

find /home/brian -name "myfile" -type f -print This searches for files named myfile in the /home/brian directory, which is the home directory for the user brian. You should always specify the directory to the deepest level you can remember.

Execute an action

find /var/ftp/mp3 -name "*.mp3" -type f -exec chmod 744 {} \; This command changes the permissions of all files with a name ending in .mp3 in the directory /var/ftp/mp3. This is obtained by specifying the option -exec chmod 744 {} \; in the command. For every file whose name ends in .mp3, the command chmod 744 {} is executed replacing {} with the name of the file. The semicolon (backslashed to avoid the shell to interpret it as a command separator) indicates the end of the command. Permission 744, usually shown as rwxr--r--, gives the file owner full permission to read, write, and execute the files, while the other users have read-only access.

Search for a string

This command will search for a string in all files from the /tmp directory and below. The /dev/null argument is used to show the name of the file before the text that is found. Without it, only the text found is printed.

find /tmp -exec grep "search string" '{}' /dev/null \; -print

Example of search for "LOG" in jsmith's home directory find ~jsmith -exec grep "LOG" '{}' /dev/null \; -print /home/jsmith/scripts/errpt.sh:cp $LOG $FIXEDLOGNAME /home/jsmith/scripts/errpt.sh:cat $LOG /home/jsmith/scripts/title:USER=$LOGNAME

The double quotes (" ") surrounding the search string and single quotes (' ') surrounding the braces are optional in this example, but needed to allow spaces and other special characters in the string.

External links

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• GNU Findutils - Comes with the xargs and locate commands.
• Official webpage for GNU find
• Linux find(1) manpage
• Unix man page

Unix software | Searching

Find