For todays article I wanted to put together a quick little cheat sheet for some GNU find command examples.
Some of these commands will be basic some will be more advanced, but they all will be useful. As a caveat some commands don’t work in all Unix environments and this is especially true with older releases. If you find yourself in one of those situations there is a way to make the find command work you will just need to use different methods like the -exec flag.
Find things by name
# find /path/to/search -name filename
Example
# find /etc -name hosts
/etc/hosts
Find things by name (case-insensitive)
# find /path/to/search -iname filename
Example
# find /etc -iname HOSTS
/etc/hosts
Find only files by name
# find /path/to/search -name filename -type f
Example
# find /etc -name network* -type f
/etc/init/networking.conf
Find only directories by name
# find /path/to/search -name dirname -type d
Example
# find /etc -name network* -type d
/etc/apparmor/init/network-interface-security
Find all symlinks
# find /path/to/search -type l
Example
# find /etc -type l
/etc/vtrgb
Find things by owner
# find /path/to/search -user owner
Example
# find ./ -user root
./
./log.file
Find executable files
# find /path/to/search -type f -executable
Example
# find ./ -type f -executable
./4/2651.file
Find SUID files
# find /path/to/search -perm -4000
Example
# find /sbin -perm -4000
/sbin/mount.ecryptfs_private
Find things changed today
# find /path/to/search -daystart -ctime -1
Example
# find ./ -daystart -ctime -1
./
Find things changed in the last 24 hours
# find /path/to/search -ctime -1
Example
# find ./ -ctime -1
./
Counting how many things you find
# find /path/to/search | wc -l
Example
# find ./ | wc -l
14674
Deleting things you find
# find /path/to/search -delete
Deleting things you find (with xargs)
# find /path/to/search | xargs rm
Deleting things you find (with exec)
# find /path/to/search -exec rm {} ;
Printing Type of file, Filename & Inode
# find /path/to/search -printf "%y %i %prn"
Example
# find ./ -printf "%y %i %prn"
d 4852409 ./
Finding Broken Symlinks
# find /path/to/search -follow -lname "*"
Example
# find ./ -follow -lname "*"
./bad_link
Find files older than 31 days and delete them
# find /path/to/search -mtime +31 -delete
Example
# find ./ -mtime +31
./sudoers.new
./file.symlink
./somedirectory
./play/list.txt2
./tar.tgz
# find ./ -mtime +31 -delete
# find ./ -mtime +31
Remove Empty Directories
# find /path/to/search -type d -exec rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty {} + ;
Tar files changed today
# tar -cvzf ../files_created_today.tgz `find /path/to/search -type f -daystart -ctime -1`
Find files bigger than X Size
# find /path/to/search -size +
Example
# find ./ -size +100M
./madflojo/Downloads/ubuntu-12.04-server-amd64.iso
Using Regex with find
# find /path/to/search -regex 'regex pattern (full path)'
Example
# find /var -regex '.*/tmp/.*[0-9]*.file'
/var/tmp/testing/2/914.file