How To Find Files In Linux Using The CLI

Have you ever been lost trying to find that one file buried deep down in the filesystem? Have you ever downloaded a file to your computer but you can't remember where you actually saved it? Have you ever wanted to find how many files containing your name in the filename is present in your system?

The find command on linux is a powerful and flexible CLI tool that allows you to find the file(s) that you are looking for. The find command is capable of finding files based on many different criteria such as filename, size, modified date, owner and so on. The output produced by the command can be a bit overwhelming if not used properly so, piping the output through other tools such as grep and sed can be very helpful.

Syntax

The basic syntax of using the find command is:

find [options] [path...] [expression]

• The options attribute controls the treatment of the symbolic links, debugging options, and optimization method.
• The path... attribute defines the starting directory or directories where find will search the files.
• The expression attribute is made up of options, search patterns, and actions separated by operators.

Examples

Let's look at some of the examples.

1. Find file with a specific name

find / -name abc.txt 2>/dev/null

• This command will search for file named abc.txt as specified by the -name flag.
• The search begins from the root directory (/).
• The use of 2>/dev/null will redirect STDERR channel to /dev/null so that the error messages wont be displayed in the terminal

2. Find files by extension

find ~ -name *.png

• This command will search the user's home directory to find all the files having .png extension.

3. Find directories

find ~ -name *oc* -type d

• The -type flag specifies the file type to search for d means directory, b means block, f means regular file, l means symbolic link.

4. Find in case-insensitive mode

find / -iname *something* -type f 2>/dev/null

• The iname flag tells the find command to search in case-insensitive mode.

5. Find files excluding specific paths

find ~ -name *.py -not -path '*/site-packages/*'

• This will exclude searching the paths that contains site-packages in them.

6. Find files greater than 500KB by specifying a maximum recursive depth to search in

find / -maxdepth 2 -size +500k 2>/dev/null

• +500k means greater than 500KB. If -500k is used, it will search for size less than 500KB

7. Run a command for each file found

find ./ -name *.txt -exec wc -l {} \;

• each filename is in place of {} to execute the command specified by the -exec flag.

8. Find files modified in the last 7 days

find / -daystart -mtime -7 2>/dev/null

9. Find empty files and delete them

find / -type f -empty -delete 2>/dev/null

There are still a lot of other options that can be used with the find command. Read the man page to 'find' out more.