60+ Practical find commands examples with explanation

find command is very much powerful command which can do good work when it’s needed to find files with conditions. Find command  is useful when finding files with complex requirement such as size, permissions etc. Suppose we want to find a file which is a regular file and it’s size is more than 1GB and it’s accessed more than 90 days back and it’s owner is none and then delete it. This entire requirement is done with single command without even writing a shell script. Let’s see how we can use find command from basics to advanced in this post.

find command can find files according to

1) File names

2) File types

3) Permissions

4) Owners

5) Modified date and time

6) Size

Advanced finds command usages

1) Mix of all the above things
2) AND operator
3) Search for files and execute commands on them
           a) chown, chmod, grep, ls, rm, mv, cp,md5sum

4) Multiple execute commands

5) Search for multiple files
            a) With different files with same extension
            b) Same file With different extensions
6) Search in multiple locations
            a) Exclude one location
            b) Search in multiple locations
         
7) OR( –o ) operator
8) ! Negation operator
9) Linux find command with Regular Expressions
10) Linux find commnd practical examples

Basics of file/folders search using find command

 find files with name

Syntax:

find path options filename

Example1: find all the files in /home with name test.txt. Here –name is used to specify the filename.

find /home –name test.txt

Example2: find the files whose name is test.txt and in present working directory

find . –name test.txt

Or

find –name test.txt

Example3: find all the files whose name contains both capital letters and small letters in it.

find /home –iname test.txt

-iname option is used to mention ignore the case sensitivity of a file.

Search for files depending on their File types:

Example4: Search for only directories whose name is var in / directory

find / -type d –name var

Example5: Search for an mp3 files whose name is temp.mp3

find / -type f –name temp.mp3

Below are the file types supported by find command, to know more about file types in Linux/Unix please have a look at our other post on File types.

Sl.noSymbolType
1fRegular file
2dDirectory file
3bBlock file
4cCharacter file
5pPipe file
6lSymbolic link file
7sSocket file.

Search for files depending on their Permissions

Example6:Search for a file name test.txt and it’s permissions are 775 in a given box

find / -perm 775 –name test.txt

Example7: How about searcing files with SUID bit set and file permissions are 755?

find / -perm 4755

Example8:How can i find SGID bit set files with 644 permissions?

find / -perm 2644

Example9: How can i find Sticky bit set files in my system with permissions 551?

find / -perm 1551

Example10:Search for all the files whose SUID bit is set

find / -perm /u=s

Example11: Search for all the files whose SGID bit is set

find / -perm /g+s

Note: We can use = or + interchangeably to check if a permissions is set or not as shown in above two examples.

Example12: Search for all the files  whose StickyBit is set

find / -perm /o=t

Example13: Search for all the files whose owener permissions is read only.

find / -perm /u=r

Example14:Search for all the files which have user, group and others with executable permissions

find / -perm /a=x

To know about more on the permissions you have look at our other posts on chmod command.

Search according to Owners and group owners.

Example15: Search for all the files with name test.txt and the owner of this file is Surendra

find / -user Surendra –name test.txt

Example16: find all the files whos name is test.txt and owned by a group called redcluster

find / -group redcluster –name test.txt

to know more about owners and groups you have to look at our the previous post on chown command.

Search according to Modified date and time.

Below is the matrix which give you brief idea on how to search according to modified date, accessed date etc.

Sl. No-ctime-mtime-atime
+90File status changed more then 90 days backModified more than 90 days backAccessed more than 90 days back
90File status changed exactly 90 days backModified exactly 90 days backAccessed exactly 90 days back
-90File status changed less than 90 daysModified less than 90 daysAccessed less than 90 days back

Example17: Search for a file: test.txt whose file status is changed more than 90 days back

find / -ctime +90 –name test.txt

Example18: Search for all the files which are modified exactly 90 days back

find / -mtime 90

Example19: Search for all the files with name test.txt which is accessed less than 90 days

find / -atime -90

Example20: find all the files which are modified more than 90 days back and less than 180 days

find / -mtime +90 –mtime -180

Below is the matrix which gives you brief idea on how to search according to modified time, accessed time in minutes etc.

Sl. No-cmin-mmin-amin
+30File status changed more then 30 mins backModified more than 30 mins backAccessed more than 30 mins back
30File status changed exactly 30 mins backModified exactly 30 mins backAccessed exactly 30 mins back
-30File status changed less than 30 minsModified less than 30 minsAccessed less than 30 mins

 

Example21: find all the files changed less than 30mins

find / -cmin -30

Example22: find all the files modified exactly 30 mins back

find / -mmin 30

Example23: find all the files accessed more than 30 mins back

find / -amin +30

Example24: find all the files which are modified more than 5mins back and less than 25mins

find / -mmin +5 –mmin -25

Example25: I have new file called test.txt which is just created, now I want to get all the files which are created later this file creation.

find / -newer test.txt

Search for files/folders depending on the size with –size option

Sl.no+1010-10
c for bytes(8 bit’s)Search for files more than 10c sizeSearch for files exactly 10b sizeSearch for files less than 10b size
k for kilobytesSearch for files more than 10k sizeSearch for files exactly 10k sizeSearch for files less than 10k size
M for MegabytesSearch for files more than 10M sizeSearch for files exactly 10M sizeSearch for files less than 10M size
G for GigabytesSearch for files more than 10G sizeSearch for files exactly 10G sizeSearch for files less than 10G size

 

Example26: Search for files whose size is more than 10bytes

find / -size +10c

Example27: Search for files which are exactly 10kb in /opt folder

find /opt –size 10k

Example28: Search for files which are less than 10MB in /var folder

find /var –size -10M

Example29: Search for files which are more than 1GB size in /usr folder

find /usr –size +1G

Example30: find all the empty files in my system

find / -size 0k

In next post on find command we will see more depth in to this find command. Please click here for more advanced Linux Find command usage

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Surendra Anne

Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.