find

find

find  command helps you to find files in a directory  structure much faster than ls command for

various options. It can widely be used for getting the list of files in a directory  and its sub directories

with a given condition on file time stamp, size, name and so on.

Example 1) Suppose that you want to know the entire directory  structure in a

Particular path, then use the find command as follows.

 /home/Varsha $  find   .  –type  d

./ebooks/perl

./ebooks/perl/1.Strings

./ebooks/perl/10.Subroutines

./ebooks/perl/11.Ref and REcs

./ebooks/perl/12.Packages, Libraries, and Modules

./ebooks/perl/13.Classes, Objects, and Ties

./ebooks/perl/14.Database Access

./songs/hindi/songs collection/15 jab we met

./songs/hindi/songs collection/1942 A Love Story

./songs/hindi/songs collection/20 hey baby

./songs/hindi/songs collection/22 jhoom barabar jhoom

././songs/hindi/songs collection/26 let the music play 3++

./songs/hindi/songs collection/Aa Dekhe Zara

./songs/hindi/songs collection/Aap Kaa Suroor

./songs/hindi/songs collection/Aashiq Banaya Aap Ne

./songs/hindi/songs collection/Rockstar

./songs/hindi/songs collection/3 idiots

.

.

.

.

 ^C

It seems varsha listens to these  songs while her boss is not around .

This command searched all the directories  starting from  /home/Varsha  and displayed it.

Similarly for displaying all the files you can use   -type f option. Here the   ‘.’  In the command refers to the current directory.

You can use any directory name as the base directory for find to search

To  display everything(i:e  all

Directories and  files) use.

find  .  - print

Example 2)

You want the output to be similar to that of ls command, use find as follows.

 /home/Varsha $  find  - type  f  -ls

244269   33 -rw-r--r--   1 Varsha  Trainee       60 Nov  9 23:58 ./ebooks/perl/1.Strings/chapter1

235915   86 -rw-r--r--   1 Varsha  Trainee      215 Nov  9 11:26 ./ebooks/perl/1.Strings/chapter2

104841   25 -rw-r--r--   1 Varsha  Trainee      554 Nov  9 11:26 ./ebooks/perl/1.Strings/chapter3

104838   32 -rw-r--r--   1 Varsha  Trainee      510 Nov  9 11:26 ./ebooks/perl/10.Subroutines/chapter1

104840   33 -rw-r--r--   1 Varsha  Trainee       55 Nov  9 11:26 ./ebooks/perl/10.Subroutines/chapter2

..

^C

The output you get are the values included in the following order

I-node number                    

 Size in kilobytes (1024 bytes)  

 Protection mode                 

 Number of hard links            

 User                            

 Group                           

 Size in bytes                   

 Modification time               

Example 3)

 Find also helps in retrieving the files which are a modified  n days before or modified after n days. Where  n is any integer.

Suppose you want the list of all the files which are modified   5 days  ago so that it can be removed after archiving It.

/home/varsha $ date

Fri Dec 23 21:16:06 IST 2011

/home/varsha $  find   . –type  f  -mtime +5     >file_list_5

Then use this file list(file_list_5)  to take a tar of the file, or to remove those files and save this file as a  copy of ‘which files have been archived’.

Similarly you can use -5  instead of  +5 for files modified after 5 days.

Example 4)

to find all the find all the files which are greater or less than a particular size, use –size option.

Suppose you want the list of files which are of size greater than 100kB,use find as follows.

/home/varsha $ find  .  –size  +100c

Example 5)
To find all files  which are created after the modification time of a particular file,use find with -newer option.
If you want to list all the files that were created after 2013-05-31 06:25 

/home/varsha/$ touch -t 201305310625  test_file

home/varsha/$  ls  -lrt   test_file
244269   33 -rw-r--r--   1 Varsha  Trainee       0 May 31  06:25

 

home/varsha/$ find . -newer  test_file
./BATCH
./BATCH/arguments.bat
./BATCH/arith.bat
./BATCH/for_loop.bat
./BATCH/if_condn.bat

./BATCH/if_condn.bat.bak
./misc
./misc/vim_list.txt
./PERL
./PERL/a1.txt
./PERL/a1.txt.orig
./PERL/a2.txt
./PERL/a2.txt.orig
./PERL/all_dir.txt

You can verify it by using -ls option.