Find

Getting Started

Usage

$ find [path...] [options] [expression]

Wildcard

$ find . -name "*.txt"
$ find . -name "2020*.csv"
$ find . -name "json_*"

• Regex reference (cheatsheets.zip)
• Find cheatsheet (gist.github.com)

Option Examples

Type

Size

Size +/-

Find all bigger than 10MB files

$ find / -size +10M

Find all smaller than 10MB files

$ find / -size -10M

Find all files that are exactly 10M

$ find / -size 10M

Find Size between 100MB and 1GB

$ find / -size +100M -size -1G

The + and - prefixes signify greater than and less than, as usual.

Names

Find files using name in current directory

$ find . -name tecmint.txt

Find files under home directory

$ find /home -name tecmint.txt

Find files using name and ignoring case

$ find /home -iname tecmint.txt

Find directories using name

$ find / -type d -name tecmint

Find php files using name

$ find . -type f -name tecmint.php

Find all php files in directory

$ find . -type f -name "*.php"

Permissions

Find the files whose permissions are 777.

$ find . -type f -perm 0777 -print

Find the files without permission 777.

$ find / -type f ! -perm 777

Find SUID set files.

$ find / -perm /u=s

Find SGID set files.

$ find / -perm /g=s

Find Read Only files.

$ find / -perm /u=r

Find Executable files.

$ find / -perm /a=x

Owners and Groups

Find single file based on user

$ find / -user root -name tecmint.txt

Find all files based on user

$ find /home -user tecmint

Find all files based on group

$ find /home -group developer

Find particular files of user

$ find /home -user tecmint -iname "*.txt"

Multiple filenames

$ find . -type f \( -name "*.sh" -o -name "*.txt" \)

Find files with .sh and .txt extensions

Multiple dirs

$ find /opt /usr /var -name foo.scala -type f

Find files with multiple dirs

Empty

$ find . -type d -empty

Delete all empty files in a directory

$ find . -type f -empty -delete

Find Date and Time

Means

Example

Examples

Find last 50 days modified files

$ find / -mtime 50

find last 50 days accessed files

$ find / -atime 50

find last 50-100 days modified files

$ find / -mtime +50 –mtime -100

find changed files in last 1 hour

$ find / -cmin -60

find modified files in last 1 hour

$ find / -mmin -60

find accessed files in last 1 hour

$ find / -amin -60

Find and

Find and delete

Find and remove multiple files

$ find . -type f -name "*.mp3" -exec rm -f {} \;

Find and remove single file

$ find . -type f -name "tecmint.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

Find and delete 100mb files

$ find / -type f -size +100m -exec rm -f {} \;

Find specific files and delete

$ find / -type f -name *.mp3 -size +10m -exec rm {} \;

Find and replace

Find all files and modify the content const to let

$ find ./ -type f -exec sed -i 's/const/let/g' {} \;

Find readable and writable files and modify the content old to new

$ find ./ -type f -readable -writable -exec sed -i "s/old/new/g" {} \;

See also: sed cheatsheet

Find and rename

Find and suffix (added .bak)

$ find . -type f -name 'file*' -exec mv {} {}.bak\;

Find and rename extension (.html => .gohtml)

$ find ./ -depth -name "*.html" -exec sh -c 'mv "$1" "${1%.html}.gohtml"' _ {} \;

Find and move

$ find . -name '*.mp3' -exec mv {} /tmp/music \;

Find and move it to a specific directory (/tmp/music)

Find and copy

$ find . -name '*2020*.xml' -exec cp -r "{}" /tmp/backup \;

Find matching files and copy to a specific directory (/tmp/backup)

Find and concatenate

Merge all csv files in the download directory into merged.csv

$ find download -type f -iname '*.csv' | xargs cat > merged.csv

Merge all sorted csv files in the download directory into merged.csv

$ find download -type f -iname '*.csv' | sort | xargs cat > merged.csv

Find and sort

Find and sort in ascending

$ find . -type f | sort

find and sort descending

$ find . -type f | sort -r

Find and chmod

Find files and set permissions to 644.

$ find / -type f -perm 0777 -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Find directories and set permissions to 755.

$ find / -type d -perm 777 -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Find and compress

Find all .java files and compress it into java.tar

$ find . -type f -name "*.java" | xargs tar cvf java.tar

Find all .csv files and compress it into cheatsheets.zip

$ find . -type f -name "*.csv" | xargs zip cheatsheets.zip

• Find
• Grep
• Grep