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For other uses, see Find (disambiguation).
The find program is a directory search utility, mostly found on Unix-like platforms. It searches through one or more directory trees of a filesystem, locating files 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 an extremely powerful program for applying actions to many files. It also supports regex matching. Look up finding in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
In computing, a directory, catalog, or folder, is an entity in a file system which can contain a group of files and/or other directories. ...
A search utility is a program, such as an application or a server, which assists a user find a file or other piece of information on a computer or on a network, such as the Internet. ...
Diagram of the relationships between several Unix-like systems A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ...
In computer science, a tree is a widely-used computer data structure that emulates a tree structure with a set of linked nodes. ...
See Filing system for this term as it is used in libraries and offices In computing, a file system is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. ...
A computer file is a collection of information that is stored in a computer system and can be identified by its full path name. ...
For computer operating systems that support a hierarchial file system, the working directory is the directory path that a user or program has designated to be the directory for files referenced by name only, or by a relative path (as contrasted with using both a files name and a...
In computing, a regular expression is a string that is used to describe or match a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. ...
Ironically, the find program is no longer preferred for searching for files by name in the entire filesystem. Instead, the locate programs, which use a database of indexed files, is more efficient at that.
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. In computing, a shell is a piece of software that provides an interface for users (command line interpreter). ...
Files only find . -name "my*" -type f This 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 the find 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 -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/weedly -name "myfile" -type f -print This 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.
Search several directories find local /tmp -name mydir -type d -print This 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: The standard streams are a set of input and output channels featured in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and provided by the standard I/O library (stdio. ...
find / -name "myfile" -type f -print 2>/dev/null
Find 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 of find.
Execute an action find /var/ftp/mp3 -name "*.mp3" -type f -exec chmod 744 {} ; 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 chmod 744 {} ; in the command. For every file whose name ends in .mp3, the command chmod 744 {} 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. Permission 744, usually shown as rwxr--r--, gives the file owner full permission to read, write, and execute the file, while other users have read-only access. In some shells, the {} must be quoted. Most modern file systems have methods of administering permissions or access rights to specific users and groups of users. ...
The chmod command (abbreviated from change mode) is a shell command in Unix and Unix-like environments. ...
Search 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: In Unix-like operating systems, /dev/null or the null device is a special file that discards all data written to it, and provides no data to any process that reads from it. ...
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.
Search for all files owned by a user find . -user <userid>
See also searchmonkey is a Gtk+ search utility originally written for use with the Unix operating system. ...
The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ...
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