Linux / Unix Find Command Avoid Permission Denied Messages

Find command basic syntax

The syntax is as follows:
find where-to-look criteria action
find /dir/to/search -name filetosearch
find /dir/to/search -name "*.c"
find /home/nixcraft/project/ -name "*.py" -print
In this example, find will search the /tmp directory for any files named “data*.txt” and display their pathnames:

find /path/to/dir -name "pattern" -print
find /tmp -iname "data*.txt"

OR

cd /tmp
find . -iname "data*.txt" -print

Fig. 01: Find will show an error message for each directory on which you don’t have read permission.

How to hide or fix find command permission denied messages

In this above example, I do not have read permission for vmware-root and orbit-Debian-gdm directories. To to avoid this problem try the following syntax:

 ## redirect error spam message to /dev/null ##
find where-to-look criteria action 2>/dev/null
find . -iname "data*.txt" -print 2>/dev/null

Sample outputs without permission denied spam from find command:

./rtzip/data005.txt
./rtzip/data001.txt
./rtzip/data004.txt
./rtzip/data003.txt
./rtzip/data002.txt
./rtzip/data008.txt
./rtzip/data006.txt
./rtzip/data007.txt
./rtzip/data009.txt

How does it works?

The 2>/dev/null at the end of the find command tells your shell to redirect the error messages (FD #2) to /dev/null, so you don’t have to see them on screen. Use /dev/null to to send any unwanted output from program/command. All data written on a /dev/null special file is discarded by the system. To redirect standard error to /dev/null and store file list to output.txt, type:

 ## redirect error spam to /dev/null ##
find . -iname "data*.txt" -print 2>/dev/null > output.txt
cat output.txt

Exclude all “permission denied” messages from “find” command on Linux

There is one problem with the following command. It would filter out all error messages created by find command, not just the permission denied ones:

find / -name foo 2>/dev/null
find / -type d -name bar 2>/dev/null

To avoid that try the following find command along with grep command on Linux or Unix-like systems:

find / -name foo 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"
find / -type d -name bar 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"

In short you should use following syntax to skip “permission denied” errors messages when running find in Linux or Unix-based systems:

find /path/to/dir -name "search-patter"  2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"
find /etc -name "x*.conf"  2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"

To store output to a file run:

find /path/to/dir -name "search-patter"  2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied" > output-file
find /etc -name "x*.conf"  2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied" > output.txt

Display output.txt using cat command:
cat output.txt

In the above example, we used find command along with grep command to filter out permission denied error messages.

Conclusion

You learned how to hide and fix permission denied messages when using the find command on your Linux, Unix, or macOS-based systems. Of course, we can also run the command as sudo when possible but avoid all this mess. Unfortunately, you will not get sudo or root access at all times. Hence, we talked about various methods here. For your ready references, sudo syntax would be as follows:
sudo find /dir/to/search -name "pattern" -action
sudo find / -name "jail.conf" -print
Please see find/bash command man page online or read it by typing the following man command:
man find
man bash
man zsh
man ksh