The following examples illustrate typical uses of the command
find
for finding files on a computer.
find / -name game
Looks for a file named "game" starting at the root directory (searching all directories including mounted filesystems). The `-name' option makes the search case sensitive. You can use the `-iname' option to find something regardless of case.
find /home -user joe
Find every file under the directory /home owned by the user joe.
find /usr -name *stat
Find every file under the directory /usr ending in "stat".
find /var/spool -mtime +60
Find every file under the directory /var/spool that was modified more than 60 days ago.
find /tmp -name core -type f -print | xargs /bin/rm -f
Find files named
core in or below the directory
/tmp
and delete them. Note that this will work incorrectly if there are
any filenames containing newlines, single or double quotes, or
spaces.
find /tmp -name core -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f
Find files named
core in or below the directory
/tmp and delete them, processing filenames in such a way
that file or directory names containing single or double quotes,
spaces or newlines are correctly handled. The
-name test
comes before the
-type test in order to avoid having to call
stat(2) on
every file.
find . -type f -exec file '{}' \;
Runs `file' on every file in or below the current directory. Notice
that the braces are enclosed in single quote marks to protect them
from interpretation as shell script punctuation. The semicolon is
similarly protected by the use of a backslash, though ';' could
have been used in that case also.
find / \( -perm -4000 -fprintf /root/suid.txt '%#m %u %p\n' \) , \
\( -size +100M -fprintf /root/big.txt '%-10s %p\n' \)
Traverse the filesystem just once, listing setuid files and
directories into
/root/suid.txt and large files into
/root/big.txt.
find $HOME -mtime 0
Search for files in your home directory which have been modified in
the last twenty-four hours. This command works this way because the
time since each file was last modified is divided by 24 hours and
any remainder is discarded. That means that to match
-mtime
0, a file will have to have a modification in the past which
is less than 24 hours ago.
find . -perm 664
Search for files which have read and write permission for their
owner, and group, but which other users can read but not write to.
Files which meet these criteria but have other permissions bits set
(for example if someone can execute the file) will not be matched.
find . -perm -664
Search for files which have read and write permission for their
owner and group, and which other users can read, without regard to
the presence of any extra permission bits (for example the
executable bit). This will match a file which has mode 0777, for
example.
find . -perm /222
Search for files which are writable by somebody (their owner, or
their group, or anybody else).
find . -perm /220
find . -perm /u+w,g+w
find . -perm /u=w,g=w
All three of these commands do the same thing, but the first one
uses the octal representation of the file mode, and the other two
use the symbolic form. These commands all search for files which
are writable by either their owner or their group. The files don't
have to be writable by both the owner and group to be matched;
either will do.
find . -perm -220
find . -perm -g+w,u+w
Both these commands do the same thing; search for files which are
writable by both their owner and their group.
find . -perm -444 -perm /222 ! -perm /111
find . -perm -a+r -perm /a+w ! -perm /a+x
These two commands both search for files that are readable for
everybody (-perm -444 or -perm -a+r), have at least on write bit
set (-perm /222 or -perm /a+w) but are not executable for anybody
(! -perm /111 and ! -perm /a+x respectively)
