The find command

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Examples about the find Linux command

• Find all the files, starting from the current working directory and using the -name option with name aBcBa.txt

find . -name "aBcBa.txt"

• Find, using the -regex option, if the current working directory contains a file with name aBcBa.txt

find . -regex "\./aBcBa.txt"

• Find all the files, starting from the current working directory and using the -regex option with name aBcBa.txt

find . -regex ".*/aBcBa.txt"

• Find all the regular files in the current working directory whose name starts with an A or with an a, followed by one character, followed by and A or an a, followed by a sequence of characters, and terminated with the extension .txt

find . -type f -iname "a?a*.txt"
find . -type f -regex ".*/[aA].[aA][^/]*\.txt"

• Find all the regular files starting from the parent of the current working directory, whose name contains two lower case a separate by a character, eventually proceeded and followed by a sequence of characters and with extension .txt (e.g., aaa.txt, axa.txt, 123axa.txt, axa123.txt, 123axa456.txt)

find . -type f -regex ".*a.a[^/]*\.txt"

• Find all the regular files starting from the home directory which have not the 777 permissions:

find ~ -type f ! -perm 777

• Find all the directories starting from the root of the file system which have the 777 permissions, and change their permission in 755:

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

• Find all the regular files starting from the current working directory whose name has extension .txt, and remove then

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

• Find all the regular files starting from the /tmp directory that are empty

find /tmp -type f -empty

• Find all the elements starting from the current working directory, whose name is x.txt or y.txt

find . -regextype posix-extended -regex ".*/(x|y).txt"

• Find all the elements starting from the directory /home owned by the user stefano whose name has extension .txt

find /home -user stefano -iname "*.txt"

• Find all the elements starting from the directory /home owned by the group developer

find /home -group developer

• Find all the elements starting from the root of the file system with size greater than 50 Megabytes and lower than 100 Megabytes

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

• Find all the regular files starting from the root of the file system whose name has extension .mp3 and their size is greater than 10 Megabytes, and remove them

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

• Find all the regular files starting from the current working directory, whose name has extension .c or .sh

find . -type f \( -name "*.c" -o -name "*.sh" \)

• Find all the regular files starting from the current working directory, whose name finishes with the string cache or xml or html

find . -type f \( -name "*cache" -o -name "*xml" -o -name "*html" \) 

• Find all the elements in the home directory with the modification date more recent than 1440 minutes (one day)

find ~ -mmin -1440

• Find all the elements in the home directory with the modification date more recent than one day (as previous command)

find ~ -mtime -1

• Find all the elements in the home directory with the modification date between 10 and 14 days

find ~ -type f -mtime +10 -mtime -14