find.md

Some common uses of find command.

Just to have a quick cheat sheet

Finding files based on date

Find all files that match the name that were modified more than an hour ago

    find . -name "some_file" -mmin +60 -ls

Remove files that were last modified at least 80 x 24h ago

find . -type f -mtime +80 -exec rm -rvf {} \;

Finding files that were created or modified on a specific date or time window Key here is to use the argument -newerXt where X is one of these: a - access, b - inode creation, c - change, m - modification time. For example, find all jpg files that were created on May 21st:

find . -type f -name "*.jpg" -newermt 2015-05-21 ! -newermt 2015-05-22 -exec ls -lash {} \;

Finding empty directories

List and delete empty directories

find . -type d -empty -ls -delete  

Finding setuid/setgid files

Find setuid and setgid files

find / \( -perm 2000 -o -perm 4000 \) -type f -print 

Finding files based on size

Find files larger than 100 megabytes and sort the result in human friendly way

find /var -type f -size +100M -exec ls -lash {} \;| sort -h

Finding files owned by certain users/groups

find . -uid 1001 -gid 1003 -ls

a bit more useful example: find all files that are owned by certain uid and gid that don't yet have permissions 0644 and change the perms to 644, exclude shell scripts.

find someplace/somewhere ! -name "*.sh" -type f -uid 1001 -gid 1001 ! -perm 0664 -exec chmod -v 664 {} \;