Find Command in Linux (Find Files and Directories)

You can use the find command to search for files and directories based on their permissions, type, date, ownership, size, and more. It can also be combined with other tools such as grep or sed . You may also visit the find man page and read about all other powerful options of the find command.

find Command Syntax

The general syntax for the find command is as follows:

find [options] [path...] [expression]

• The options attribute controls the treatment of the symbolic links, debugging options, and optimization method.
• The path… attribute defines the starting directory or directories where find will search the files.
• The expression attribute is made up of options, search patterns, and actions separated by operators.

Example:- To search all “.js” files in “/var/www” directory

find -L /var/www -name "*.js"

Find Files by Name

To search for a file named document.pdf in the /home/ouralien directory, you would use the following command:

find /home/ouralien -type f -name document.pdf

To run a case-insensitive search, change the -name option with -iname:

find /home/ouralien -type f -iname document.pdf

The command above will match “Document.pdf”, “DOCUMENT.pdf” ..etc.

Find Files by Extension

Searching for files by extension is the same as searching for files by name. For example:-

find /var/log/nginx -type f -name '*.log.gz'

It is important to mention that you must either quote the pattern or escape the asterisk * symbol with backslash \ so that it doesn’t get interpreted by the shell when you use the wildcard character.

To find all files that don’t match the regex *.log.gz you can use the -not option. For example, to find all files that don’t end in *.log.gz you would use:

find /var/log/nginx -type f -not -name '*.log.gz'

Find Files by Type

Sometimes you might need to search for specific file types such as regular files, directories, or symlinks. In Linux, everything is a file.

To search for files based on their type, use the -type option and one of the following descriptors to specify the file type:

• f: a regular file
• d: directory
• l: symbolic link
• c: character devices
• b: block devices
• p: named pipe (FIFO)
• s: socket

For instance, to find all directories in the current working directory , you would use:

find . -type d

The common example would be to recursively change the website file permissions to 644 and directory permissions to 755 using the chmod command:

find /var/www/my_website -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

find /var/www/my_website -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;

Find Files by Size

• To find files based on the file size, pass the -size parameter along with the size criteria. You can use the following suffixes to specify the file size:b: 512-byte blocks (default)
• c: bytes
• w: two-byte words
• k: Kilobytes
• M: Megabytes
• G: Gigabytes

The following command will find all files of exactly 1024 bytes.

find /tmp -type f -size 1024c

In the following example, we search for all files less than 1MB inside the current working directory, then you need to use the plus – symbol:

find . -type f -size -1M

If you want to search for files with a size greater than 1MB, then you need to use the plus + symbol:

find . -type f -size +1M

You can even search for files within a size range. The following command will find all files between 1 and 2MB:

find . -type f -size +1M -size 21M

Find Files by Modification Date

The find command can also search for files based on their last modification, access, or change time.

Same as when searching by size, use the plus and minus symbols for “greater than” or “less than”.

You can easily filter all files under the /etc/dovecot/conf.d directory that ends with .conf and has been modified in the last five days:

find /etc/dovecot/conf.d -name "*.conf" -mtime 5

Here is another example of filtering files based on the modification date using the -daystart option. The command below will list all files in the /home directory that were modified 30 or more days ago:

find /home -mtime +30 -daystart

Find Files by Permissions

The -perm option allows you to search for files based on the file permissions.

For example, to find all files with permissions of exactly 644 inside the /var/www/html directory, you would use:

find /var/www/html -perm 644

Find Files by Owner

To find files owned by a particular user or group, use the -user and -group options.

For example, to search for all files and directories owned by the user ouralien, you would run:

find / -user ouralien

Here is a real-world example. Let’s say you want to find all files owned by the user www-data and change the ownership of the matched files from www-data to nginx:

find / -user www-data -type f -exec chown nginx {} \;

Find and Delete Files

To delete all matching files, append the -delete option to the end of the match expression.

Ensure you are using this option only when you are confident that the result matches the files you want to delete. It is always a good idea to print the matched files before using the -delete option.

For example, to delete all files ending with .temp from the /var/log/, you would use:

find /var/log/ -name `*.temp` -delete

Use the -delete option with extreme caution. The find command is evaluated as an expression and if you add the -delete option first, the command will delete everything below the starting points you specified.

When it comes to directories, find can delete only empty directories, same as rmdir .