UNIX Find A File Command
Q. I've just started to use Sun Solaris UNIX in our Labs. I'd like to know more about finding files from the shell prompt. How do I find a file under UNIX?
A. You need to use find command which is used to search files and directories under UNIX and Linux like operating systems. You can specify criteria while search files. If no criteria is set, it will returns all files below the current working directory. find also supports regex matching and other advanced options.
Examples
Find all perl (*.pl) files in current directory:
$ find . -name '*.pl'
The . represent the current directory and the -name option specifies all pl (perl) files. The quotes avoid the shell expansion and it is necessary when you want to use wild card based search (without quotes the shell would replace *.pl with the list of files in the current directory).
To list only files and avoid all directories
$ find . -type f -name '*.pl'
Above command will only list files and will exclude directories, special files, pipes, symbolic links etc.
Search all directories
Search file called httpd.conf in all directories:
$ find / -type f -name httpd.conf
Generally this is a bad idea to look for files. This can take a considerable amount of time. It is recommended that you specify the directory name. For example look httpd.conf in /usr/local directory:
$ find /usr/local -type f -name httpd.conf
Execute command on all files
Run ls -l command on all *.c files to get extended information :
$ find . -name "*.c" -type f -exec ls -l {} \;
You can run almost all UNIX command on file. For example, modify all permissions of all files to 0700 only in ~/code directory:
$ find ~/code -exec chmod 0700 {} \;
Search for all files owned by a user called payal:
$ find . -user
$ find . -user payal
Read find command man page for detailed information:
$ man find
See our previous articles about finding files:
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Related Other Helpful FAQs:
- Find File on Linux
- Locate files on linux, FreeBSD and UNIX system
- Finding files in Linux filesystems
- Find files that do not have any owners or do not belong to any user under Linux/UNIX
- Linux: How can I find a file on my system?
Discussion on This FAQ
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Tags: find command, find command examples, linux find files, search file, Solaris-Unix, unix command, unix find files
May 14th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
It would be interesting to know how to find files that contains certain words in the text (inside the file)
May 15th, 2008 at 8:25 am
Mich,
grep 'main()' *.cgrep -r "string" /home/you
find . -exec grep -H "string" '{}' \; -print
HTH
May 15th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Also you can combine find with xargs in a powerful ways for example:
find ~/code -print0 | xargs -0 chmod -v 0700
the previous commands change mode of every file under
~/code including code directory.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
great article, thanks for putting this out there, all these find tips are in my notes now.
June 24th, 2008 at 11:49 am
find . -name “chapter*” -print | xargs grep “Bhanu”
It will search for the files starting with chapter,
and with in these files it will search for Bhanu string.