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Using Find Command to Find & Manipulate Files

The “find” command is a powerful command, which lets one search for files according to many criteria.

Below are a few examples. I found them here. In this post I just trimmed some of the text of the original post in order to have a quick reference without much explanations.

1. Find the file “myfile.txt” in the current directory and all its sub-directories:

find -name “myfile.txt”

2. Like above, but ignoring case:

find -iname “myfile.txt”

3.  Find the file “myfile.txt” in current directory and its sub-directories upto 3 directory levels down:

find -maxdepth 3 -name “myfile.txt”

4. Find the file “myfile.txt” in sub-directories of current directory, starting from directory level 3:

find -mindepth 3 -name “myfile.txt”

* Note: A combination of mindepth and maxdepth can be used to look for files from level N to level M

5. Find the file “myfile.txt” and apply the command “cat” on it:

find -name “myfile.txt” -exec cat {} \;

6. Find files in the current directory whose names are not myfile.txt:

find -maxdepth 1 -not -name “myfile.txt”

7. Look for the file with inode number 1234567 and rename it to newname.txt

find -inum 1234567 -exec mv {} “newname.txt” \;

8. Find files that have read permessions only to group:

find -perm g=r -type f -exec ls -l {} \;

OR

find -perm 040 -type f -exec ls -l {} \;

9. Find all empty (zero byte) files in home directory and all its sub-directories:

find ~ -empty

10. Find all non-hidden empty files in current directory:

find . -maxdepth 1 -empty -not -name “.*”

11. Find the top 5 largest files in current directory and its sub-directories:

find . -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n -r | head -5

12. Find top 5 smallest files in current directory and its sub-directories:

find . -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n | head -5

13. Find top 5 smallest files in current directory and sub-directories, excluding empty files:

find . -type f -not -empty -exec ls -s {} \; |sort -n | head -5

14. Find only socket files in current directory and its sub-directories:

find . -type s

* Nots: use ’s’ for sockets, ‘d’ for directories, ‘f’ for refular files.

15. Find files newer (modified later) than myfile.txt:

find -newer “myfile.txt”

16. Find files with size greater than 100M:

find . -size +100M

17. Find files smaller than 100M:

find . -size -100M

18. Find file whose size is exactly 100M:

find . -size 100M

Original article here.

Related posts:

1. Renaming Files In Linux
2. Navigate Efficiently To Your Most Used Directories With Autojump
3. Create a Directory Tree With One Command
4. Copy a Directory Along With Its Relative Path
5. Edit The Command Line With Vim

Tags: Bash, Linux, Productivity