From LQWiki

find is a tool which allows primarily for the searching of files in a directory hierarchy. It allows for versatile search criteria, for formatted output, and for custom commands to be run on search-results

Examples

List all files fully qualified (e.g. /etc/services instead of services)

tweedleburg:/ # find
.
./.vmware
./srv
./srv/ftp
...

If one wants to find and delete all old backup files from your vi or emacs edit sessions, but save directories that happen to end in a tilde

As root:

  find / -type f -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;

That's it. Another example, if you wanted to perform a simple recursive grep:

  find . -exec grep -H "searchtext" {} \;

Find all non-empty files:

find -not -empty

Find also works well with xargs. Using xargs minimizes the number of times that grep or rm is run, speeding things up. The last commands could have been:

  find / -type f -name "*~" | xargs rm
  find | xargs grep "searchtext"

From the current dir down

  find . -type f -ctime -3 -exec ls -l {} \;

for the last 72 hours

  find . -daystart -type f -ctime -3 -exec ls -l {} \;

To delete all files with the name dummy in tmp try

  cd /tmp;find ./ -name 'dummie*' -exec rm -f \{\} ';'

To count the rows of all your files in the current directory use

find | xargs cat  | wc -l

External links

• find man page
• findutils web page (www.gnu.org)