Find

Find things in a directory tree

find <directory> -type f -name '<pattern>'

Find files in and below <directory> that match <pattern>. Type f is for files, d for directory's, no type finds all.

find -L <directory>'

Do follow symbolic links, default behavior is not to follow.

find <directory> -xdev -name <pattern>'

Limit the search to the current file-system, do not go into mounted filesystems.

find <directory> -type f -name '<pattern>' -execdir <command> {} \;

For each file found execute <command> in the directory containing the file. {} represents the found file. NOTE!! Do not forget the \; at the end.

-exec works too but is less secure as mistakes main lead to execution in an unexpected place.

If more commands need to be executed specify -exec <command> {} \; for each command.

find <directory> -type f -mtime 1

Find files modified 1 day ago (between 24 and 48 hours).

Negative numbers find all files modified max 1 day ago.

Positive numbers (explicitly signed with +) find all files at modified at least 1 day ago.

-mmin counts minutes instead of days.

find <directory> -type f -newer <filename>

Find files modified after the modification time of <filename>

You can set the modification time of <filename> like touch -t YYYYmmddHHMM <filename>

find <directory> -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n'

Print the files modification times in epoch (seconds since Jan 1, 1970) and the filename. Can be used e.g. to find the last files modified (with sort -n and tail)

find <dir> -printf '%s %p\n'| sort -nr | head -10

Find the top 10 largest files under a directory

find <dir> -type f -mtime +30 -ls|awk 'BEGIN {} {totsize+=$7} END { print totsize/1000000}'

Find the total size of all files older than 30 days.

find <dir> -type f -inum <inode number> -delete

Find file by inode number and delete it. This can be used to removed files with weird names. This does not delete the inode, if files have more hardlinks all must be deleted.

Other options to select specific files are (among many others):

-user  (username)
-uid   (user id)
-group (group name)
-gid   (group id)

find <dir> -depth -type d -empty -delete

Find empty directories and delete them