- Find
The
find
program is a directory search utility onUnix-like platforms. It searches through one or more directory trees of afilesystem , locating files based on some user-specified criteria. By default,find
returns all files below the currentworking 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 regex matching.The
find
program is no longer preferred for searching for files by name in the entire filesystem. Instead, thelocate
programs, which use a database of indexed files (obtained throughfind
), are more efficient.Find syntax
A single white space is needed to divide syntax elements when writing a find command. Otherwise, some usage error will come up...
Examples
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. In newer versions of the program, the directory may be omitted, and it will imply the current directory.
Files only
find . -name "my*" -type fThis 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. (Note that early versions of thefind
command had no default action at all; therefore the resulting list of files would be discarded, to the bewilderment of users.)find . -name "my*" -type f -lsThis prints an extended file information.
earch all directories
find / -name "myfile" -type f -printThis 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.
pecify a directory
find /home/weedly -name "myfile" -type f -printThis searches for files named "myfile" in the "/home/weedly" directory, the home directory for userid "weedly". You should always specify the directory to the deepest level you can remember.
earch several directories
find local /tmp -name mydir -type d -printThis searches for directories named "mydir" in the "local" subdirectory of the current working directory and the "/tmp" directory.
Ignore errors
If you're doing this as a user other than root, you might want to ignore permission denied (and any other) errors. Since errors are printed to
stderr , they can be suppressed by redirecting the output to /dev/null. The following example shows how to do this in the bash shell: find / -name "myfile" -type f -print 2>/dev/nullIf you are a csh or
tcsh user, you cannot redirectstderr without redirectingstdout as well. You can use sh to run the find command to get around this: sh -c find / -name "myfile" -type f -print 2>/dev/nullFind any one of differently named files
find . ( -name "*jsp" -or -name "*java" ) -type f -ls
The
-ls
option prints extended information, and the example finds 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. The-ls
option and the-or
operator are not available on all versions offind
.Execute an action
find /var/ftp/mp3 -name "*.mp3" -type f -exec chmod 644 {} ;This command changes the permissions of all files with a name ending in ".mp3" in the directory "/var/ftp/mp3". The action is carried out by specifying the option
-exec
in the command. For every file whose name ends inchmod 644 {} ;.mp3
, the commandchmod 644 {}
is executed replacing{}
with the name of the file. The semicolon (backslashed to avoid the shell interpreting it as a command separator) indicates the end of the command. Permission644
, usually shown asrw-r--r--
, gives the file owner full permission to read and write the file, while other users have read-only access. In some shells, the{}
must be quoted.Note that the command itself should *not* be quoted; otherwise you get error messages like
find: echo "mv ./3bfn rel071204": No such file or directory
which means that find is trying to run a file called 'echo "mv ./3bfn rel071204"' and failing.
If you will be executing over many results, it is more efficient to pipe the results to the
xargs command instead.If running under Windows, don't include the backslash before the semicolon:
find . -exec grep blah {} ;
earch for a string
This command will search for a string in all files from the /tmp directory and below:
find /tmp -exec grep "search string" '{}' /dev/null ; -print
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. An equivalent mechanism is to use the "-H" or "--with-filename" option to grep:find /tmp -exec grep -H "search string" '{}' ; -print
GNU grep can be used on its own to perform this task:
grep -r "search string" /tmp
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.earch for all files owned by a user
find . -user
ee also
*locate, a Unix search tool based on a prebuilt database therefore faster than find
*List of Unix programs
*List of DOS commands External links
* [http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/ GNU Findutils] - Comes with the
xargs and locate commands.
* [http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html Official webpage for GNU find]
* [http://www.softpanorama.org/Tools/Find/find_mini_tutorial.shtml Softpanorama find tutorial]
*
* [http://www.enciclopedia.galeon.com/find.html Exercises "Find"]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.