Find

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 an extremely powerful program for applying actions to many files. It also supports regexp matching.

Contents 1 Examples 1.1 From current directory 1.2 Files only 1.3 Commands 1.4 Search all directories 1.5 Specify a directory 1.6 Ignore errors 1.7 Find any one of differently named files 1.8 Execute an action 1.9 Search for a string 2 See also 3 External links

[edit] Examples

[edit] 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 quotes avoid the shell expansion - without them the shell would replace my* with the list of files whose names begin with my in the current directory.

[edit] 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...

[edit] Commands

The previous examples created listings of results because, by default, find executes the '-print' action. (Note that early versions of the find command had no default action at all; therefore the resulting list of files would be discarded, to the bewilderment of naïve users.)

find . -name "my*" -type f -ls

This prints an extended file information.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Ignore errors

If you're doing this as a user other than root, you might want to ignore permission denied (and any other) errors with this:

find / -name "myfile" -type f -print 2>/dev/null

[edit] Find any one of differently named files

find . ( -name "*jsp" -or -name "*java" ) -type f -ls

This prints extended information on any file whose name ends with either 'jsp' or 'java'. Note that the parentheses are required. Also note that the operator "or" can be abbreviated as "o". The "and" operator is assumed where no operator is given. In many shells the parentheses must be escaped with a backslash, "\(" and "\)", to prevent them from being interpreted as special shell characters.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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

Example of search for the string "ERROR" in all xml files in the current directory and all sub-directories

find . -name "*.xml" -exec grep "ERROR" '{}' \; -print

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.

[edit] See also

• searchmonkey, an alternative search tool using the Gtk front-end

[edit] External links

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

view • talk • edit Unix command line programs (more)
File and file system management:	cat | cd | chmod | chown | chgrp | cp | du | df | file | fsck | ln | ls | lsof | mkdir | more | mount | mv | pwd | rm | rmdir | split | touch | tree
Process management:	anacron | at | chroot | crontab | kill | killall | nice | pgrep | pidof | pkill | ps | sleep | screen | time | timex | top | wait
User Management/Environment:	env | finger | id | locale | mesg | passwd | su | sudo | uname | uptime | w | wall | who | whoami | write
Text processing:	awk | cut | diff | ex | head | iconv | join | less | more | nkf | paste | sed | sort | tail | tr | uniq | wc | xargs
Shell programming:	echo | expr | printf | unset	Printing:	lp
Communications: inetd | netstat | ping | rlogin | traceroute	Searching: find | grep | strings	Miscellaneous: banner | bc | cal | man | size | yes