FIND
0. What is it?
From man find: find - search for files in a directory hierarchy.
Files can be found under Linux in many different ways.
Using the find tool is one of the best
ways to find files.
The find tool has a huge number of parameters which can be set so that
Linux finds exactly those files that you were searching for.
1. Simplest use of find
find / -name
'program.c'
/
Start searching from the root
directory (i.e / directory)
-name
Given search text is the filename rather than any other attribute of a
file
'program.c' Search text that we have entered. Always
enclose the filename in single quotes.. why to do this is complex.. so
simply do so.
2. Other uses
find
/home/david -name 'index*'
find
/home/david -iname 'index*'
The 1st command would find files having the letters index as the
beginning of the file name. The search would be started in the
directory /home/david and carry on within that directory and its
subdirectories only.
The 2nd command would search for the same, but the case of the filename wouldn't be
considered. So all files starting with any combination of letters in
upper and lower case such as INDEX or indEX or index would be returned.
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find -name
met*
The above command would start searching for the files that begin with
the letters 'met' within
the
current
directory and
the directories that are present within the current directory.
Since the directory is not specified as the the second parameter, Linux
defaults to using the current directory as the one to start the search
in.
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find
/mp3collection -name '*.mp3' -size -5000k
find / -size
+10000k
The 1st command would find within a directory called /mp3collection,
only those mp3 files that have a size less than 5000 Kilobytes
( < 5MB)
The 2nd command would search from the / directory for any file that is larger than 10000k (>
10MB)
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find
/home/david -amin -10 -name '*.c'
find
/home/david -atime -2 -name '*.c'
find
/home/david -mmin -10 -name '*.c'
find
/home/david -mtime -2 -name '*.c'
The 1st commmand searches for those files that are present in the
directory /home/david and its subdirectoires which end in .c and which have been accessed in
the last 10 minutes.
The 2nd command does the same but searches for those files that have been accessed in
the last 10 hours.
The 3rd and the 4th commands do the same as the 1st and 2nd commands
but they search
for modified files rather than accessed files.
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find / -mount
-name 'win*'
This command searches for files starting with the letters 'win' in
their filenames. The only difference is that the mounted filesystems
would not be searched for this time. This is useful when you have your
Windows partitions mounted by default. And a search for 'win' might
return many files on those partitions, which you may not be really
interested in. This is only one use of -mount parameter.
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find
/mp3-collection -name 'Metallica*' -and -size +10000k
find
/mp3-collection -size +10000k ! -name "Metallica*"
find
/mp3-collection -name 'Metallica*' -or -size +10000k
Boolean operators such as AND, OR and
NOT make find an extremely useful tool.
The 1st command searches within the directory /mp3-collection for files
that have their names beginning with 'Metallica' and whose size is
greater than 10000 kilobytes (> 10 MB).
The 2nd command searches in the same directory as above case but only
for files that are greater than 10MB, but they should not have
'Metallica' as the starting of their filenames.
The 3rd command searches in the same directory for files that begin
with 'Metallica' in their names or all the files that are greater than
10 MB in size.
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The exec option is probably the most
important feature of the find tool.
The exec command allows you to execute a particular command on the
results of the find command.
A simple demonstration of this feature is shown below. Its upto your
imagination to make maximum use of this feature.
Suppose you wanted to see the details of the files (read, write,
execute permission, file size, owner etc..) that have been returned as
a search result you could do the following
find / - name
'Metallica*' -exec ls -l {\}\ \;
This command would find all the files on your system that begin with
the letters 'Metallica' and would then execute the 'ls -l' command on
these files.
So basically you would be able to see the details of the files that
were returned according to your search criteria.
The words following the -exec option is the command that you want to
execute i.e. ls -l in this case.
{\}\ is basically an indicator that the filenames returned by the
search should be substituted here.
\; is the terminating string, and is required at the end of the command
Yet another example:
find . -name
"*.css" -exec grep -Hn "Metallica*" {} \;
that allows to find text inside the
required files, showing the name of the file, the number of the line,
and text of the line.
