Findutils

The GNU Find Utilities (or Findutils) are the basic directory searching utilities of the GNU operating system. These programs are typically used in conjunction with other programs to provide modular and powerful directory search and file locating capabilities to other commands.

Findutils tools

The tools supplied with this package are:

• find - search for files in a directory hierarchy
• locate - list files in databases that match a pattern
• updatedb - update a file name database
• xargs - build and execute command lines from standard input

Examples

Note: Adapted from the GNU Project homepage.

• Here is an example operation to make all HTML files in the subdirectory htdocs readable by all using find and xargs. This is a typical example of how find and xargs are used with other utilities to provide powerful directory traversal capability:

find htdocs -name '*.html' -print0 | xargs -0 chmod a+r 

• find all files in a given path containing the word "EXAMPLE" in them (time the difference):

time find /home/foo/bar -type f -exec grep EXAMPLE {} \; -print
time find /home/foo/bar -type f|xargs grep EXAMPLE   # <- faster

• find (list) all files in a given path having "Fo*" in their filename:

find bar/ -name 'Fo*' -exec ls -l {} \+ 

• search for files modified within the last day that match a certain filenaming pattern and remove them (i.e. execute rm):

find . -name "[Tt][Ee][Ss][Tt]*" -mtime -1 -exec rm {} \;  # CAREFUL!!

External links

• findutils — GNU Project homepage
• findutils documentation
• wikipedia:Find
• wikipedia:GNU locate
• wikipedia:Xargs