Cheat sheets for Find

Usage

find <path> <conditions> <actions>

Conditions

-name "*.c"

-user jonathan
-nouser

# File
-type f

# Directory
-type d

# Symlink
-type l

# At least 3 levels deep
-depth 2
-regex PATTERN

# Exactly 8 512-bit blocks
-size 8

# Smaller than 128 bytes
-size -128c

# Exactly 1440KiB
-size 1440k

# Larger than 10MiB
-size +10M

# Larger than 2GiB
-size +2G

-newer   file.txt

# modified newer than file.txt
-newerm  file.txt

# [c]hange, [m]odified, [B]create
-newerX  file.txt

# [t]imestamp
-newerXt "1 hour ago"

Basic 'find file' commands

# full command
find / -name foo.txt -type f -print

# -print isn't necessary
find / -name foo.txt -type f

# don't have to specify "type==file"
find / -name foo.txt

# search under the current dir
find . -name foo.txt

# wildcard
find . -name "foo.*"

# wildcard
find . -name "*.txt"

# search '/users/al'
find /users/al -name Cookbook -type d

Search multiple dirs

# search multiple dirs
find /opt /usr /var -name foo.scala -type f

Case-insensitive searching

# find foo, Foo, FOo, FOO, etc.
find . -iname foo

# same thing, but only dirs
find . -iname foo -type d

# same thing, but only files
find . -iname foo -type f

Find files with different extensions

# *.c and *.sh files
find . -type f \( -name "*.c" -o -name "*.sh" \)

# three patterns
find . -type f \( -name "*cache" -o -name "*xml" -o -name "*html" \)

Find files that don't match a pattern (-not)

# find all files not ending in ".html"
find . -type f -not -name "*.html"

Find files by text in the file (find + grep)

# find StringBuffer in all *.java files
find . -type f -name "*.java" -exec grep -l StringBuffer {} \;

# ignore case with -i option
find . -type f -name "*.java" -exec grep -il string {} \;

# search for a string in gzip'd files
find . -type f -name "*.gz" -exec zgrep 'GET /foo' {} \;

5 lines before, 10 lines after grep matches

find . -type f -name "*.scala" -exec grep -B5 -A10 'null' {} \;

Find files and act on them (find + exec)

# change html files to mode 644
find /usr/local -name "*.html" -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

# change cgi files to mode 755
find htdocs cgi-bin -name "*.cgi" -type f -exec chmod 755 {} \;

# run ls command on files found
find . -name "*.pl" -exec ls -ld {} \;

Find and copy

# cp *.mp3 files to /tmp/MusicFiles
find . -type f -name "*.mp3" -exec cp {} /tmp/MusicFiles \;

Copy one file to many dirs

# copy the file header.shtml to those dirs
find dir1 dir2 dir3 dir4 -type d -exec cp header.shtml {} \;

Find and delete

# remove all "Foo*" files under current dir
find . -type f -name "Foo*" -exec rm {} \;

# remove all subdirectories named "CVS" under current dir
find . -type d -name CVS -exec rm -r {} \;

Access time conditions

-atime 0       # Last accessed between now and 24 hours ago
-atime +0      # Accessed more than 24 hours ago
-atime 1       # Accessed between 24 and 48 hours ago
-atime +1      # Accessed more than 48 hours ago
-atime -1      # Accessed less than 24 hours ago (same a 0)
-ctime -6h30m  # File status changed within the last 6 hours and 30 minutes
-mtime +1w     # Last modified more than 1 week ago

These conditions only work in MacOS and BSD-like systems (no GNU/Linux support).

Find files by modification time

# 24 hours
find . -mtime 1

# last 7 days
find . -mtime -7

# just files
find . -mtime -7 -type f

# just dirs
find . -mtime -7 -type d

Find files by modification time using a temp file

# 1) create a temp file with a specific timestamp
touch 09301330 poop

# 2) returns a list of new files
find . -mnewer poop

# 3) rm the temp file
rm poop

Find with time: this works on mac os x

find / -newerct '1 minute ago' -print

Find and tar

find . -type f -name "*.java" | xargs tar cvf myfile.tar
find . -type f -name "*.java" | xargs tar rvf myfile.tar

Find, tar, and xargs

find . -name -type f '*.mp3' -mtime -180 -print0 | xargs -0 tar rvf music.tar
     (-print0 helps handle spaces in filenames)

Find and pax (instead of xargs and tar)

find . -type f -name "*html" | xargs tar cvf jw-htmlfiles.tar -
find . -type f -name "*html" | pax -w -f jw-htmlfiles.tar