The find command in examples Posted on Feb 25, 2015 by Corinna in Development, DevOps & SysAdmins |

Corinna – a Mac user – likes working on the terminal but she never managed to find anything with it. She used to switch to OS X’s Finder for searching. Not anymore! She finally sat down to figure out find and has assembled her favorite examples in this cheat sheet like 1-pager:

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Sources:

Content of the 1-pager:

look for “needle.txt” within the current directory & its subdirectories

find . -name “needle.txt”

ignore case, find “Needle” & “needle”

find . -iname “needle”

name contains “needle”; list only matching files

find . -type f -name “*needle*”

search everywhere; list only matching directories

find / -type d -name “needle”

additionally ignore all errors, such as “Permission denied”

find / 2>/dev/null -type d -name “needle”

check all .txt files whether they contain “needle”

find . -type f -iname “.txt” -print | xargs grep “needle”

same as above, but now it also works with filenames that contain spaces

find . -type f -iname “*.txt*” -print0 | xargs -0 grep “needle”

find all empty files in /tmp

find /tmp -type f -empty

remove all these empty files

find /tmp -type f -empty -print | xargs rm -f

files bigger than 50MB but smaller than 100MB

find / -type f -size +50M -size -100M

created during the last 50 days

find / -ctime -50

modified more than 90 minutes ago

find / -mmin +90

accessed during the last 24 hours but

not within the last hour

find / -atime -1 -amin +60

find all executable files

find / -perm /a=x

find files that don’t have 644 permissions

find / -type f ! -perm 644

find files with 777 permissions a nd change them to 755

find / -type f -perm 0777 -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;

find all PDFs owned by user “seamstress” (-group exists, too)

find / -user seamstress -iname “*.pdf”