find - - search for files in a directory hierarchy

crouse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Apr 2025 Posts: 11833 Location: Iowa

find - search for files in a directory hierarchy

One of the best references i've found on the net for the find utility is here: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Find.html

Simply put, "find" locates files. Like grep locates something IN a file, find locates files in directories. Also like grep, the odds of you memorizing all the options for find are slim to none Wink

man find will of course give you the long list of available options to "find".

Example:

JP · Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2025 1:10 am Post subject:

Thanks crouse, you were the one who told me to use "locate" and "find", this just puts icing on the cake Wink

.

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masinick · Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2025 4:31 am Post subject:

You can use find in combination with pipes, xargs, and then include -exec as an argument to execute various commands. Used in that way, you can do all kinds of incredible things, and you can be both powerful and dangerous. I have not really exercised the use of xargs more than once or twice, but it is nice to at least know of it when you need it. Xargs helps you deal with the issue of having too much wildcard or file expansion when you are running find commands against a large number of files expanded by your expression. Ever had the command line interpreter go berserk when you have more stuff on the line than it can handle? Xargs is there for just that scenario; maybe not something that comes up every day, but sure handy when you need it.

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masinick · Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2025 4:35 am Post subject: Link to info on find with xargs

See http://www.kalamazoolinux.org/tech/find.html for some handy uses of the find command.

An excerpt: xargs

* Why do we need this "xargs" thing? It's in the presentation title! Smile

Answer: Speed and efficiency.
o The second line runs much faster than the first for a large number of files:
+ find / -name core -exec rm -f {} \;
+ rm -f $(find / -name core -print)
In other words, running "rm" once, with all the filenames on the command line
is much faster than running "rm" multiple times, once for each file.
o However, the second line could fail if the number of files is very large and
exceeds the maximum number of characters allowed in a single command.
o "xargs" will combine the single line output of find and run commands with multiple
arguments, multiple times if necessary to avoid the max chars per line limit.
+ find / -name core -print | xargs rm -f
o The simplest way to see what xargs does, is to run some simple commands:
+ find $HOME -maxdepth 2 -name \*.jpg -exec echo {} \;
+ find $HOME -maxdepth 2 -name \*.jpg | xargs echo

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Brian Masinick
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coastie · Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2025 11:54 am Post subject:

Found another good one for find

http://dmiessler.com/study/find/

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crouse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Apr 2025 Posts: 11833 Location: Iowa

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