Of the various Unix utilities I use semi-regularly, find is the one that has me reaching for its documentation the most often. Every time I do, it’s a reminder of how powerful it can be, if you can just remember how to use it.
This article goes over how to use find beyond just searching for files by name, mostly just so that I have something to refer back to when I inevitably forget how to use it again.
The Basics
Generally, find usage looks like this: find path arguments. find takes a path (searched recursively by default), and a set of arguments.
The -name argument is used to find files by name. For files named myawesomefile in your current directory (including subdirectories), you would run find . -name myawesomefile.
When looking for a file by name, you can use wildcard characters to help broaden your search. For all Markdown files found in and below your current directory, you could run find . -name *.markdown
Finding Files By Date
find has support for finding files by last access date, file modification date, and file contents modification date.
To find all files that were edited less than a day ago: find . -mtime -1. Each of the time arguments (-mtime, in this case) work 24 hours at a time. You can specify this by adding a qualifier to the end of your time argument; find . -mtime +60s will return all files modified over a minute ago.
Finding Files By Permissions
Say you want to find all executable files under a directory. This is the incantation for you: find . -type f -perm +111
The -perm argument can be preceded by either a + or a -. The man page for find has this to say:
If the mode is preceded by a plus (“+”), this primary evaluates to true if any of the bits in the mode are set in the file’s mode bits.
Finding Files By Size
Perhaps my favorite of find’s abilities: the size argument.
For fun, let’s learn which files are hogging Dropbox: find ~/Dropbox -size +100M. What about files which are smaller than 10KB on our desktop? find ~/Desktop -size -10k.
Note the difference in the trailing character on those last commands; uppercase M specifies megabytes, whereas lowercase k indicates kilobytes. find’s size support goes from bytes all the way up to petabytes.
Finding Files By Type
Last of all, find knows the difference between files and directories. For all directories greater than 1GB under the ~/Library directory (this may take a few seconds): find ~/Library -size +1G -type d
-type f lets you specify files exclusively, with l and s giving you the ability to find links and sockets respectively.
Combining Arguments
find allows you to not only specify which arguments you want to look for, but also those you do not want to look for.
Going back to the Markdown hunting earlier, try finding all files which aren’t Markdown: find . ! -name *.markdown. By adding ! in front of an expression, find negates it for you.
How about finding all Sass and CSS files in a project? find . -name *.css -o -name *.scss uses the -o (“or”) operator to find files across multiple name formats.