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Blog Common UNIX Find Commands

Common UNIX Find Commands

One of the most useful utilities in the UNIX systems resources directory is the find command. System administrators use this powerful utility frequently. Here are a few common tasks performed by the ubiquitous find command. I’ll add more as time goes on.

# cd /export/home/esofthub

Find a file or directory
# find . -name TEMP -print
or
# find . -name TEMP -exec echo {} \;

Find core files in this directory tree and remove them
# find . -name “core” -exec rm -f {} \;

Find junk directories and remove their contents recursively
# find . -name “junk” -exec rm -rf {} \;

Find files not starting with “junk” OR not ending with “log”
# find . ! \( -name “junk*” -o -name “*log” \) -print

Find a pattern in a file using the recursive grep (ignore case)
# find . -type f | xargs grep -i MYPATTERN
# find . -name ‘*.sh’ -exec grep -i MYPATTERN {} \;

Find files modified in the past 7 days
# find . -mtime -7 -type f

Find files owned by a particular user
# find . -user esofthub

Find all your writable directories and list them
# find . -perm -0777 -type d -ls
or
# find . -type d -perm 777 -print

Find all your writable files and list them
# find . -perm -0777 -type f -ls
or
#find . -type f -perm 777 -print

Find large file sizes and list them or output to file
# find . -type f -size +1000 -ls
or
# find . -type f -size +1000 -print
# find . -type f -size +2000K | tee 
filename

Find how many directories are in a path (counts current directory)
# find . -type d -exec basename {} \; | wc -l
53

Find how many files are in a path
# find . -type f -exec basename {} \; | wc -l
120

Find all my pipe files and change their permissions to all writable
# find . -name “pipe*” -exec chmod 666 {} \;

Find files that were modified 7 days ago and archive
# find . -type f -mtime 7 | xargs tar -cvf `date ‘+%d%m%Y’_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified more than 7 days ago and archive
# find . -type f -mtime +7 | xargs tar -cvf `date ‘+%d%m%Y’_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified less than 7 days ago and archive
# find . -type f -mtime -7 | xargs tar -cvf `date ‘+%d%m%Y’_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified more than 7 days ago but less than 14 days ago and archive
# find . -type f -mtime +7 -mtime -14 | xargs tar -cvf `date ‘+%d%m%Y’_archive.tar`

Find files in two different directories having the “test” string and list them
# find esofthub esoft -name “*test*” -type f -ls

Find files in two different directories having the “test” string and list them
# find esofthub esoft -name “*test*” -type f -ls

Find files in two different directories having the “test” string and count them
# find esofthub esoft -name “*test*” -type f -ls | wc -l
12

Find files and directories newer than CompareFile
# find . -newer CompareFile -print

Find files and directories older than CompareFile
# find . ! -newer CompareFile -print

Find files and directories but don’t traverse a particular directory
# find . -name RAID -prune -o -print

Find all the files in the current directory
# find * -type f -print -o -type d -prune

Find files associated with an inode
# find . -inum 968746 -print
# find . -inum 
968746 -exec ls -l {} \;

Find an inode and remove
# find . -inum 968746 -exec rm -i {} \;

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