7/5/2014 35 Practical Examples of Linux Find Command

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35 Practical Examples of Linux Find Command

By Ravi Saive Under: CentOS, Fedora, Linux Commands, Linux Distros, RedHat On: July 18, 2012

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The Linux Find Command is one of the most important and much used command in Linux sytems. Find command used
to search and locate list of files and directories based on conditions you specify for files that match the arguments. Find
can be used in variety of conditions like you can find files by permissions, users, groups, file type, date, size and
other possible criteria.

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7/5/2014 35 Practical Examples of Linux Find Command

35 Linux Find Commands Examples

Through this article we are sharing our day-to-day Linux find command experience and its usage in the form of
examples. In this article we will show you the most used 35 Find Commands examples in Linux. We have divided the
section into Five parts from basic to advance usage of find command.

1. Part I: Basic Find Commands for Finding Files with Names

2. Part II: Find Files Based on their Permissions
3. Part III: Search Files Based On Owners and Groups
4. Part IV: Find Files and Directories Based on Date and Time
5. Part V: Find Files and Directories Based on Size

Part I – Basic Find Commands for Finding Files with Names

1. Find Files Using Name in Current Directory

Find all the files whose name is tecmint.txt in a current working directory.

# find . -name tecmint.txt

./tecmint.txt

2. Find Files Under Home Directory

Find all the files under /home directory with name tecmint.txt.

# find /home -name tecmint.txt

/home/tecmint.txt

3. Find Files Using Name and Ignoring Case

Find all the files whose name is tecmint.txt and contains both capital and small letters in /home directory.
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# find /home -iname tecmint.txt

./tecmint.txt
./Tecmint.txt

4. Find Directories Using Name

Find all directories whose name is Tecmint in / directory.

# find / -type d -name Tecmint

/Tecmint

5. Find PHP Files Using Name

Find all php files whose name is tecmint.php in a current working directory.

# find . -type f -name tecmint.php

./tecmint.php

6. Find all PHP Files in Directory

Find all php files in a directory.

# find . -type f -name "*.php"

./tecmint.php
./login.php
./index.php

Part II – Find Files Based on their Permissions

7. Find Files With 777 Permissions

Find all the files whose permissions are 777.

# find . -type f -perm 0777 -print

8. Find Files Without 777 Permissions

Find all the files without permission 777.

# find / -type f ! -perm 777

9. Find SGID Files with 644 Permissions

Find all the SGID bit files whose permissions set to 644.

# find / -perm 2644

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10. Find Sticky Bit Files with 551 Permissions

Find all the Sticky Bit set files whose permission are 551.

# find / -perm 1551

11. Find SUID Files

Find all SUID set files.

# find / -perm /u=s

12. Find SGID Files

Find all SGID set files.

# find / -perm /g+s

13. Find Read Only Files

Find all Read Only files.

# find / -perm /u=r

14. Find Executable Files

Find all Executable files.

# find / -perm /a=x

15. Find Files with 777 Permissions and Chmod to 644

Find all 777 permission files and use chmod command to set permissions to 644.

# find / -type f -perm 0777 -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;

16. Find Directories with 777 Permissions and Chmod to 755

Find all 777 permission directories and use chmod command to set permissions to 755.

# find / -type d -perm 777 -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;

17. Find and remove single File

To find a single file called tecmint.txt and remove it.

# find . -type f -name "tecmint.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

18. Find and remove Multiple File

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To find and remove multiple files such as .mp3 or .txt, then use.

# find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;

OR

# find . -type f -name "*.mp3" -exec rm -f {} \;

19. Find all Empty Files

To file all empty files under certain path.

# find /tmp -type f -empty

20. Find all Empty Directories

To file all empty directories under certain path.

# find /tmp -type d -empty

21. File all Hidden Files

To find all hidden files, use below command.

# find /tmp -type f -name ".*"

Part III – Search Files Based On Owners and Groups

22. Find Single File Based on User

To find all or single file called tecmint.txt under / root directory of owner root.

# find / -user root -name tecmint.txt

23. Find all Files Based on User

To find all files that belongs to user Tecmint under /home directory.

# find /home -user tecmint

24. Find all Files Based on Group

To find all files that belongs to group Developer under /home directory.

# find /home -group developer

25. Find Particular Files of User

To find all .txt files of user Tecmint under /home directory.

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# find /home -user tecmint -iname "*.txt"

Part IV – Find Files and Directories Based on Date and Time

26. Find Last 50 Days Modified Files

To find all the files which are modified 50 days back.

# find / -mtime 50

27. Find Last 50 Days Accessed Files

To find all the files which are accessed 50 days back.

# find / -atime 50

28. Find Last 50-100 Days Modified Files

To find all the files which are modified more than 50 days back and less than 100 days.

# find / -mtime +50 –mtime -100

29. Find Changed Files in Last 1 Hour

To find all the files which are changed in last 1 hour.

# find / -cmin -60

30. Find Modified Files in Last 1 Hour

To find all the files which are modified in last 1 hour.

# find / -mmin -60

31. Find Accessed Files in Last 1 Hour

To find all the files which are accessed in last 1 hour.

# find / -amin -60

Part V – Find Files and Directories Based on Size

32. Find 50MB Files

To find all 50MB files, use.

# find / -size 50M

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33. Find Size between 50MB – 100MB

To find all the files which are greater than 50MB and less than 100MB.

# find / -size +50M -size -100M

34. Find and Delete 100MB Files

To find all 100MB files and delete them using one single command.

# find / -size +100M -exec rm -rf {} \;

35. Find Specific Files and Delete

Find all .mp3 files with more than 10MB and delete them using one single command.

# find / -type f -name *.mp3 -size +10M -exec rm {} \;

That’s it, We are ending this post here, In our next article we will discuss more about other Linux commands in depth
with practical examples. Let us know your opinions on this article using our comment section.

Bio Latest Posts

Ravi Saive
Owner at TecM int.com

Simple Word a Computer Geek and Linux Guru who loves to share tricks and tips on Internet.
Most Of My Servers runs on Open Source Platform called Linux.

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25 Responses

1. Ernesto says:
December 21, 2012 at 12:03 am

Number 34 needs to have another 0 in the command. Its currently set to find files larger than 10MB not 100 as
the description states.

Reply

Ravi Saive says:

December 21, 2012 at 11:30 am

@Ernesto,
Thanks, corrected now..

Reply
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7/5/2014 35 Practical Examples of Linux Find Command

Melvin says:
March 23, 2013 at 8:06 pm

While this post is quite old. May I make two suggestions. 34) instead of running -exec rm -rf, the
less cpu taxing option would be to add -delete to find. Would be good to note and using -print first
to confirm what is being deleted or just the find command piped to head to confirm some of the files
is a good step before using any additional command/options that would delete.

35) Pretty much the same as 34 as it is missing the deletion option.

Reply

2. robert h. williams says:

December 24, 2012 at 11:41 am

hi! glad i found your site and the informative articles. question re: “35 Practical Examples of Linux Find
Command”:
in # 3. ‘ find /home -iname tecmint.txt’, what is proper way to filter results of this command such that the
Uppercase results are sorted from the lowercase results?
ex.:
…….
Techmint.com
Techmint.com1
Techmint.com2 …….

techmint.com
techmint.com1
techmint.com2, etc., etc., etc.

Thanks again for all the good info. Have A Healthy, Prosperous Day!
—rob

Reply

3. Mac says:
January 29, 2013 at 9:27 pm

Can you explain this option to me, I am new to the command line – still learning.

#15 # find / -type f -perm 0777 -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;

the symbols {} and the \

I am a bit confused, any help/advice would be great.

Reply

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Ravi Saive says:

January 30, 2013 at 10:56 am

@Mac, Please join us on Facebook at Linux Inside, you will get the answer for this.

Reply

Melvin says:
March 23, 2013 at 8:13 pm

The brackets are placeholders for the file that find, finds and the \ is so that the shell does not interpret the
semicolon (;), which would normally end the command.

Reply

4. vijaya says:
July 2, 2013 at 1:50 pm

It is really helpful for beginners

thanks…

Reply

5. Luis says:
July 14, 2013 at 12:03 am

como recuperar los archivos eliminados con el comando # find / -type f -name *.mp3 -size +10M -exec ls -l {}
\;

Reply

6. Joe says:
September 16, 2013 at 8:10 pm

In example 22, the description should be ‘under the / root directory’ instead of ‘under /root directory’.

Reply

Ravi Saive says:

September 17, 2013 at 1:07 pm

Thanks, corrected up in the article.

Reply

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7/5/2014 35 Practical Examples of Linux Find Command

7. PDFformat says:
October 9, 2013 at 9:51 pm

Can you please publish the posts in PDF format ?

Thanks for the post :)

Reply

8. Siddharth says:
October 22, 2013 at 2:45 am

35. Find all .mp3 files with more than 10MB and delete them using one single command.

# find / -type f -name *.mp3 -size +10M -exec ls -l {} \; — but there is not command to delete the files.

1) how to list files in range (A001 to A090)suppose if there are log file which names are
starting with log.A001 to log.A00nth or may be more .
2)list out the files created in a certain date.
3)search the string pattern “xyz” in all files and count how many times the string is present in all the locations.

please help

Reply

9. karna says:
November 13, 2013 at 3:01 pm

In example 35 i think it should be rm instead of ls -l

Reply

Ravi Saive says:

November 13, 2013 at 5:31 pm

Yes! it should be rm command. Thanks corrected now..

Reply

10. ram says:

December 6, 2013 at 3:42 pm

Locate User “username” regular files and save as /tmp/backup

find / -user username -type f -exec cp -a ………………. please complete this … needed earlier

Reply
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7/5/2014 35 Practical Examples of Linux Find Command

11. Anudeep S P says:

January 27, 2014 at 3:29 pm

How we can find the the files inside a directory with respect to date range and remove them.?

Example: I want to remove the files created between “1st Jan 2012 8AM” and “5th Jan 2014 10PM”

Reply

Ravi Saive says:

January 27, 2014 at 5:00 pm

Anu, please post your questions at our newly launched TecMint Ask section for instant answers from our
experts.

Reply

12. ngapakerz says:

February 24, 2014 at 2:53 pm

how can i use this two as single command?

find -name ‘*.jpg’ -mtime +7 -exec jpegoptim {} \;
find -name ‘*.jpg’ -mtime +7 -exec chown www-data:www-data {} \;
thanks :)

Reply

13. Rondinelli says:

March 9, 2014 at 7:44 pm

Amazing! very helpful!

Reply

14. Dinkar says:

April 22, 2014 at 10:19 am

How to delete a file in a directory which was created 13months back?

Reply

15. sameer says:

May 4, 2014 at 7:00 am

this is quite useful page and I used many of these commands after seeing your page .

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7/5/2014 35 Practical Examples of Linux Find Command

thank you so much for such a wonderful collection of the commands with example.

All the best to you

Reply

16. anonymous says:

May 9, 2014 at 7:07 am

This is an incredibly useful building block, thanks!!

Reply

17. snarker says:

June 3, 2014 at 7:19 pm

You know, with HTML you can turn a table of contents into links that take a reader straight to each section …
just sayin’.

Reply

18. Sanjay says:

June 13, 2014 at 12:31 pm

it is very useful for me as i m new to shell commands.

thanks for posting articles…..

Reply

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