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Information About

Find




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 File s 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 extremely powerful program for applying actions to many files. It also supports Regexp matching.

EXAMPLES


From current directory


  • This searches in the current directory (represented by a period) and below it, for files and directories with names starting with ''my''.



Files only

  • " -type f

  • This limits the above search to files.



Commands

The previous examples created listings of results because, by default, find executes the '-print' action.

  • " -type f -ls

  • This prints an extended file information.



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.


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.


Execute an action

This command actually changes modes of files:
  • .mp3" -type f -exec chmod 744 {} \;

  • This will change all of the files with a name ending in ''.mp3'' in the directory ''/var/ftp/mp3'' to have their mode changed to 744, or rwxr--r--. This gives you full permission to read, write, and execute the files. However, other users will only have read-only access to the files. The braces ''{}'' are translated to the name of each file found.



Search for a string

This command will search for a string in all files from the /tmp directory and below. The /dev/null 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
/home/jsmith/scripts/errpt.sh:cat
/home/jsmith/scripts/title:USER=

The double quotes (" ") surrounding the search string and single quotes (' ') surrounding the braces are optional in the example, but needed to allow spaces and other special characters in the string.


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