Have you ever felt frustrated searching for files manually on your computer? If you’re a developer or DevOps engineer working on GUI-less Linux servers, it'll be hard navigating back and forth to find files.
Many people are unaware of the power of Linux terminals. Linux has an incredibly powerful command line that allows you to search files and directories in a fraction of a second.
Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, and if you're looking to take your file management skills to the next level, you've arrived at the right spot. This article will help you understand the basics of the most commonly used find command in Linux.
What is the find
Command in Linux?
The find
command allows you to search for files and directories on your computer. It adds the flexibility to search for files in a specific directory or recursively through all sub-directories.
Let’s explore the power of the find
command
How to Search a File by Name
Let’s say you saved a file called hello_world.html
somewhere and you don’t even remember the directory name. But your boss is asking you to send them the file immediately.
Usually, if you forgot where you stored a file, you'd begin by going through folder after folder and checking if the file exists.
This is when the find
command does a great job. Instead of searching the file manually on your computer, you can use the find
command to automate the process.
By passing the name of the file using the -name
flag, the find
command searches and returns the location of the file.
find -name <file_name>
Terminal command to search a file by name
But remember the -name
flag performs a case-sensitive search. If you are looking to do a case-insensitive search, you can use the -iname
flag instead.
find -iname <file_name>
Terminal command to do case-sensitive search
You can also use the find
command as an alternative to the ls
command in some places. Let's assume you need to find all the files ending with the .txt
extension. You can do so with the find
command using the regex pattern (*.txt
).
find /path/to/search -name "*.txt"
Terminal command displaying file search by matching a pattern
This command will list all the .txt
files in your current directory and its sub-directories.
To find .txt
files in a particular directory and sub-directory, you can replace the /path/to/search
with the path of your directory.
How to Find a Directory in Linux
Searching for a directory is possible by passing the d
to the -type
parameter in the find
command.
find /path/to/search -type d
Terminal command to search a directory using find
command
In the above screenshot, we're finding a directory named zip
from our current directory.
Similarly the -type
option accepts other parameter options to simplify our finding process.
f
finds the list of regular filesb
finds the list of block devicesc
finds the list of character devicesl
finds the list of symbolic linkss
finds the list of socketsp
finds the named pipes
How to Search a File by Size in Linux
Adding the -size
option along with the find
command helps you find files based on size. Prepend a +
or -
to the size to represent greater than and less than, respectively.
find /path/to/search -size <size_of_the_file>
Terminal command to search files by size
In the above screenshot, we're finding all the files that have a size greater than 1 GB.
You can also search for all files that fall within a specific size range.
For example, if you want to find all the files that are above 50 MB and below 100 MB, you can run the following command:
find /path/to/search -size +50M -size -100M
Terminal command to search files within a range
You can specify the size in your preferred notation. A few of the available notations are:
- K represents KB
- M represents MB
- G represents GB
- b represents bytes
- c represents blocks
How to Search a File Based on Time Modified
Every file has a created and last updated time associated with it. Let's assume you have thousands of files in your directory. You edited a file in the past couple of days and forgot its name. You're sure that you have edited only a couple of files after that.
In such cases, you can find all the files that were modified within the past 7 days. This limits your search from 1000+ files to a more manageable amount. You'll be able to find the file you edited in seconds after running the command.
This is possible by passing -mtime
parameter with the find
command.
find /path/to/search -mtime <-number_of_days_ago>
Terminal command to search file based on modified time
Let's assume another scenario, where today's date is February 10, 2023. You modified a file before Feb 3, 2023. After Feb 3, 2023, you modified a lot of files. You have to find the file which you modified before Feb 3, 2023. So, basically, you need the files that were modified before Feb 3, 2023.
Strange scenario, right?
But, you can also run this query using the find
command. You can achieve this by exchanging the negative sign (-) with the positive sign (+).
Here's the modified command for you:
find /path/to/search -mtime +7
How to Execute a Command on Files Filtered from the find
Command
This question may confuse you. Before revealing the answer, let's understand the question clearly with a real scenario.
Let's assume you have 1000 files in a directory, and running the find
command returns 20 matching files. You want to move these 20 files into a different directory. How can you achieve that?
Simply put, we have to run a command over each of the filtered files.
You can do this by passing the -exec
option with the find
command.
The -exec
option executes a command on each file that is found in the search. The -exec
option is followed by a command and its arguments, with the {}
symbols representing the path of the file being processed.
To represent the end of the -exec
command, we have to add \;
(a backward slash and a semi-colon).
Here's the syntax:
find /path/to/search -name -exec {} \;
Let’s try to move the filtered files from the 5minslearn
directory to the zip
directory.
Here’s the command:
find ./5minslearn -name "*.zip" -exec mv {} ./5minslearn/zip \;
This command searches for all files ending with a .zip
in the ./5minslearn
directory and then moves each file to the ./5minslearn/zip
directory.
The -exec
option allows you to perform a wide range of operations on the files that are found. You can replace the move command from the above example by copying, deleting, or even changing the file permission command.
How to Execute a Command on Files Filtered with a Confirmation
Most people will prefer to use this if they're not sure about whether to apply the operation on each file.
The -ok
option is similar to the -exec
option except that it will ask for confirmation before executing the operation on each file. This command is super helpful to review files that will be affected before executing the specific operation. You also have the option to decline if you're not sure or don't wish to apply the command.
For example, this time let's try to move the .txt
files to the other directory.
find /path/to/search -name "*.txt" -ok mv {} /path/to/destination \;
Terminal command to move the filtered files with a confirmation
The above command searches for all files with a .txt
extension in the ./5minslearn
directory and then prompts the user to confirm before moving each file to the ./5minslearn/text_files
directory.
To approve the operation, enter yes
and no
to decline the operation and skip to the next file.
The -ok
option is useful when you want to be cautious about the files you are modifying, as it allows you to inspect each file and its location before executing the specified command.
How to Find a File with Detailed Information
The -ls
option in the find command is used to display information about the files found in the search, in the format of the ls command. This option provides detailed information about the files, such as their permissions, owner, size, and last modified time.
find /path/to/search -name "*.<file-extension>" -ls
Terminal command to list files in ls
command format
How to Find and Remove Files
Have you ever needed to find files and remove them from your computer? The -delete
option in the find command does this for you. It allows you to delete files that match the specified criteria.
find . -name "*.<extension>" -delete
In the above example, you can see that the find command deleted the files with the .html
extension
Note: This operation is irreversible. Be 100% sure when you run the delete operation.
I would advise running the find
command without the -delete
flag at first and ensure that only the files that need to be deleted are shown. Once you're sure, you can execute the same command appending -delete
flag.
Conclusion
In this article, you learned how to search files effectively using your Linux terminal.
These are very basic options in the find command that I think every developer should know. I believe mastering the fundamentals is the first step to becoming more advanced with Linux. I've been covering basics in all my blogs to help you create a solid foundation.
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