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By default, find prints to the standard output the names of the
files that match the given criteria. See section Actions, for how to get more
information about the matching files.
Here are ways to search for files whose name matches a certain pattern. See section Shell Pattern Matching, for a description of the pattern arguments to these tests.
Each of these tests has a case-sensitive version and a case-insensitive version, whose name begins with `i'. In a case-insensitive comparison, the patterns `fo*' and `F??' match the file names `Foo', `FOO', `foo', `fOo', etc.
True if the base of the file name (the path with the leading directories removed) matches shell pattern pattern. For `-iname', the match is case-insensitive. To ignore a whole directory tree, use `-prune' (see section Directories). As an example, to find Texinfo source files in `/usr/local/doc':
find /usr/local/doc -name '*.texi'
True if the entire file name, starting with the command line argument under which the file was found, matches shell pattern pattern. For `-ipath', the match is case-insensitive. To ignore a whole directory tree, use `-prune' rather than checking every file in the tree (see section Directories).
True if the entire file name matches regular expression expr. This is a match on the whole path, not a search. For example, to match a file named `./fubar3', you can use the regular expression `.*bar.' or `.*b.*3', but not `b.*r3'. See section `Syntax of Regular Expressions' in The GNU Emacs Manual, for a description of the syntax of regular expressions. For `-iregex', the match is case-insensitive.
To search for files by name without having to actually scan the
directories on the disk (which can be slow), you can use the
locate program. For each shell pattern you give it,
locate searches one or more databases of file names and displays
the file names that contain the pattern. See section Shell Pattern Matching,
for details about shell patterns.
If a pattern is a plain string--it contains no
metacharacters---locate displays all file names in the database
that contain that string. If a pattern contains
metacharacters, locate only displays file names that match the
pattern exactly. As a result, patterns that contain metacharacters
should usually begin with a `*', and will most often end with one
as well. The exceptions are patterns that are intended to explicitly
match the beginning or end of a file name.
The command
locate pattern
is almost equivalent to
find directories -name pattern
where directories are the directories for which the file name
databases contain information. The differences are that the
locate information might be out of date, and that locate
handles wildcards in the pattern slightly differently than find
(see section Shell Pattern Matching).
The file name databases contain lists of files that were on the system when the databases were last updated. The system administrator can choose the file name of the default database, the frequency with which the databases are updated, and the directories for which they contain entries.
Here is how to select which file name databases locate searches.
The default is system-dependent.
--database=path
-d path
LOCATE_PATH to set the list of database files to search. The
option overrides the environment variable if both are used.
find and locate can compare file names, or parts of file
names, to shell patterns. A shell pattern is a string that may
contain the following special characters, which are known as
wildcards or metacharacters.
You must quote patterns that contain metacharacters to prevent the shell from expanding them itself. Double and single quotes both work; so does escaping with a backslash.
*
?
[string]
\
In the find tests that do shell pattern matching (`-name',
`-path', etc.), wildcards in the pattern do not match a `.'
at the beginning of a file name. This is not the case for
locate. Thus, `find -name '*macs'' does not match a file
named `.emacs', but `locate '*macs'' does.
Slash characters have no special significance in the shell pattern
matching that find and locate do, unlike in the shell, in
which wildcards do not match them. Therefore, a pattern `foo*bar'
can match a file name `foo3/bar', and a pattern `./sr*sc' can
match a file name `./src/misc'.
There are two ways that files can be linked together. Symbolic links are a special type of file whose contents are a portion of the name of another file. Hard links are multiple directory entries for one file; the file names all have the same index node (inode) number on the disk.
True if the file is a symbolic link whose contents match shell pattern pattern. For `-ilname', the match is case-insensitive. See section Shell Pattern Matching, for details about the pattern argument. So, to list any symbolic links to `sysdep.c' in the current directory and its subdirectories, you can do:
find . -lname '*sysdep.c'
Dereference symbolic links. The following differences in behavior occur when this option is given:
find follows symbolic links to directories when searching
directory trees.
To find hard links, first get the inode number of the file whose links you want to find. You can learn a file's inode number and the number of links to it by running `ls -i' or `find -ls'. If the file has more than one link, you can search for the other links by passing that inode number to `-inum'. Add the `-xdev' option if you are starting the search at a directory that has other filesystems mounted on it, such as `/usr' on many systems. Doing this saves needless searching, since hard links to a file must be on the same filesystem. See section Filesystems.
File has inode number n.
You can also search for files that have a certain number of links, with `-links'. Directories normally have at least two hard links; their `.' entry is the second one. If they have subdirectories, each of those also has a hard link called `..' to its parent directory.
File has n hard links.
Each file has three time stamps, which record the last time that certain operations were performed on the file:
You can search for files whose time stamps are within a certain age range, or compare them to other time stamps.
These tests are mainly useful with ranges (`+n' and `-n').
True if the file was last accessed (or its status changed, or it was modified) n*24 hours ago.
True if the file was last accessed (or its status changed, or it was modified) n minutes ago. These tests provide finer granularity of measurement than `-atime' et al. For example, to list files in `/u/bill' that were last read from 2 to 6 hours ago:
find /u/bill -amin +2 -amin -6
Measure times from the beginning of today rather than from 24 hours ago. So, to list the regular files in your home directory that were modified yesterday, do
find ~ -daystart -type f -mtime 1
As an alternative to comparing timestamps to the current time, you can
compare them to another file's timestamp. That file's timestamp could
be updated by another program when some event occurs. Or you could set
it to a particular fixed date using the touch command. For
example, to list files in `/usr' modified after February 1 of the
current year:
touch -t 02010000 /tmp/stamp$$ find /usr -newer /tmp/stamp$$ rm -f /tmp/stamp$$
True if the file was last accessed (or its status changed, or it was modified) more recently than file was modified. These tests are affected by `-follow' only if `-follow' comes before them on the command line. See section Symbolic Links, for more information on `-follow'. As an example, to list any files modified since `/bin/sh' was last modified:
find . -newer /bin/sh
True if the file was last accessed n days after its status was last changed. Useful for finding files that are not being used, and could perhaps be archived or removed to save disk space.
True if the file uses n units of space, rounding up. The units are 512-byte blocks by default, but they can be changed by adding a one-character suffix to n:
b
c
k
w
The size does not count indirect blocks, but it does count blocks in sparse files that are not actually allocated.
True if the file is empty and is either a regular file or a directory. This might make it a good candidate for deletion. This test is useful with `-depth' (see section Directories) and `-exec rm -rf '{}' ';'' (see section Single File).
True if the file is of type c:
b
c
d
p
f
l
s
The same as `-type' unless the file is a symbolic link. For symbolic links: if `-follow' has not been given, true if the file is a link to a file of type c; if `-follow' has been given, true if c is `l'. In other words, for symbolic links, `-xtype' checks the type of the file that `-type' does not check. See section Symbolic Links, for more information on `-follow'.
True if the file is owned by user uname (belongs to group gname). A numeric ID is allowed.
True if the file's numeric user ID (group ID) is n. These tests support ranges (`+n' and `-n'), unlike `-user' and `-group'.
True if no user corresponds to the file's numeric user ID (no group
corresponds to the numeric group ID). These cases usually mean that the
files belonged to users who have since been removed from the system.
You probably should change the ownership of such files to an existing
user or group, using the chown or chgrp program.
See section File Permissions, for information on how file permissions are structured and how to specify them.
True if the file's permissions are exactly mode (which can be numeric or symbolic). Symbolic modes use mode 0 as a point of departure. If mode starts with `-', true if all of the permissions set in mode are set for the file; permissions not set in mode are ignored. If mode starts with `+', true if any of the permissions set in mode are set for the file; permissions not set in mode are ignored.
To search for files based on their contents, you can use the grep
program. For example, to find out which C source files in the current
directory contain the string `thing', you can do:
grep -l thing *.[ch]
If you also want to search for the string in files in subdirectories,
you can combine grep with find and xargs, like
this:
find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -l thing
The `-l' option causes grep to print only the names of files
that contain the string, rather than the lines that contain it. The
string argument (`thing') is actually a regular expression, so it
can contain metacharacters. This method can be refined a little by
using the `-r' option to make xargs not run grep if
find produces no output, and using the find action
`-print0' and the xargs option `-0' to avoid
misinterpreting files whose names contain spaces:
find . -name '*.[ch]' -print0 | xargs -r -0 grep -l thing
For a fuller treatment of finding files whose contents match a pattern,
see the manual page for grep.
Here is how to control which directories find searches, and how
it searches them. These two options allow you to process a horizontal
slice of a directory tree.
Descend at most levels (a non-negative integer) levels of directories below the command line arguments. `-maxdepth 0' means only apply the tests and actions to the command line arguments.
Do not apply any tests or actions at levels less than levels (a non-negative integer). `-mindepth 1' means process all files except the command line arguments.
Process each directory's contents before the directory itself. Doing
this is a good idea when producing lists of files to archive with
cpio or tar. If a directory does not have write
permission for its owner, its contents can still be restored from the
archive since the directory's permissions are restored after its contents.
If `-depth' is not given, true; do not descend the current directory. If `-depth' is given, false; no effect. `-prune' only affects tests and actions that come after it in the expression, not those that come before.
For example, to skip the directory `src/emacs' and all files and directories under it, and print the names of the other files found:
find . -path './src/emacs' -prune -o -print
Do not optimize by assuming that directories contain 2 fewer
subdirectories than their hard link count. This option is needed when
searching filesystems that do not follow the Unix directory-link
convention, such as CD-ROM or MS-DOS filesystems or AFS volume mount
points. Each directory on a normal Unix filesystem has at least 2 hard
links: its name and its `.' entry. Additionally, its
subdirectories (if any) each have a `..' entry linked to that
directory. When find is examining a directory, after it has
statted 2 fewer subdirectories than the directory's link count, it knows
that the rest of the entries in the directory are non-directories
(leaf files in the directory tree). If only the files' names need
to be examined, there is no need to stat them; this gives a significant
increase in search speed.
A filesystem is a section of a disk, either on the local host or
mounted from a remote host over a network. Searching network
filesystems can be slow, so it is common to make find avoid them.
There are two ways to avoid searching certain filesystems. One way is
to tell find to only search one filesystem:
Don't descend directories on other filesystems. These options are synonyms.
The other way is to check the type of filesystem each file is on, and not descend directories that are on undesirable filesystem types:
True if the file is on a filesystem of type type. The valid filesystem types vary among different versions of Unix; an incomplete list of filesystem types that are accepted on some version of Unix or another is:
ufs 4.2 4.3 nfs tmp mfs S51K S52KYou can use `-printf' with the `%F' directive to see the types of your filesystems. See section Print File Information. `-fstype' is usually used with `-prune' to avoid searching remote filesystems (see section Directories).
Operators build a complex expression from tests and actions. The operators are, in order of decreasing precedence:
( expr )
! expr
-not expr
expr1 expr2
expr1 -a expr2
expr1 -and expr2
expr1 -o expr2
expr1 -or expr2
expr1 , expr2
find searches the directory tree rooted at each file name by
evaluating the expression from left to right, according to the rules of
precedence, until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for
`-and', true for `-or'), at which point find moves on
to the next file name.
There are two other tests that can be useful in complex expressions:
Always true.
Always false.
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