Cheat Sheet: 21 useful find commands

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