The find program is a directory search utility, mostly found on Unix-like platforms. It searches through one or more directory trees of a filesystem, locating files based on some user-specified criteria. By default, find returns all files below the current working directory. Further, find allows the user to specify an action to be taken on each matched file. Thus, it is an extremely powerful program for applying actions to many files. It also supports regex matching.

Ironically, the find program is no longer preferred for searching for files by name in the entire filesystem. Instead, the locate programs, which use a database of indexed files, is more efficient at that.

From current directory

find . -name 'my

This searches in the current directory (represented by a period) and below it, for files and directories with names starting with ''my''. The quotes avoid the shell expansion - without them the shell would replace ''my

'' with the list of files whose names begin with ''my'' in the current directory. In newer versions of the program, the directory may be omitted, and it will imply the current directory.

Files only

find . -name "my

" -type f

This limits the results of the above search to only regular files, therefore excluding directories, special files, pipes, symbolic links, etc. ''my

'' is enclosed in quotes as otherwise the shell would replace it with the list of files in the current directory starting with ''my''...

Commands

The previous examples created listings of results because, by default, find executes the '-print' action. (Note that early versions of the find command had no default action at all; therefore the resulting list of files would be discarded, to the bewilderment of users.)

find . -name "my

" -type f -ls

This prints an extended file information.

Search all directories

find / -name "myfile" -type f -print
This searches every file on the computer for a file with the name ''myfile''. It is generally not a good idea to look for data files this way. This can take a considerable amount of time, so it is best to specify the directory more precisely.

Ignore errors

If you're doing this as a user other than root, you might want to ignore permission denied (and any other) errors. Since errors are printed to stderr, they can be suppressed by redirecting the output to /dev/null. The following example shows how to do this in the bash shell:
find / -name "myfile" -type f -print 2>/dev/null

Find any one of differently named files

find . \( -name "

jsp" -or -name "*java" \) -type f -ls

The -ls option prints extended information, and the example finds any file whose name ends with either 'jsp' or 'java'. Note that the parentheses are required. Also note that the operator "or" can be abbreviated as "o". The "and" operator is assumed where no operator is given. In many shells the parentheses must be escaped with a backslash, "$" and "$", to prevent them from being interpreted as special shell characters. The -ls option and the -or operator are not available on all versions of find.

Execute an action

find /var/ftp/mp3 -name "

.mp3" -type f -exec chmod 744 {} \;

This command changes the permissions of all files with a name ending in ''.mp3'' in the directory ''/var/ftp/mp3''. The action is carried out by specifying the option -exec chmod 744 {} \; in the command. For every file whose name ends in .mp3, the command chmod 744 {} is executed replacing {} with the name of the file. The semicolon (backslashed to avoid the shell interpreting it as a command separator) indicates the end of the command. Permission 744, usually shown as rwxr--r--, gives the file owner full permission to read, write, and execute the file, while other users have read-only access. In some shells, the {} must be quoted.

Search for a string

This command will search for a string in all files from the /tmp directory and below:

find /tmp -exec grep "search string" '{}' /dev/null \; -print

The /dev/null argument is used to show the name of the file before the text that is found. Without it, only the text found is printed. An equivalent mechanism is to use the "-H" or "--with-filename" option to grep:

find /tmp -exec grep -H "search string" '{}' \; -print

GNU grep can be used on its own to perform this task:

grep -R "search string" /tmp

Example of search for "LOG" in jsmith's home directory
find ~jsmith -exec grep "LOG" '{}' /dev/null \; -print
/home/jsmith/scripts/errpt.sh:cp $LOG $FIXEDLOGNAME
/home/jsmith/scripts/errpt.sh:cat $LOG
/home/jsmith/scripts/title:USER=$LOGNAME

Example of search for the string "ERROR" in all xml files in the current directory and all sub-directories
find . -name "

.xml" -exec grep "ERROR" '{}' \; -print

The double quotes (" ") surrounding the search string and single quotes (' ') surrounding the braces are optional in this example, but needed to allow spaces and other special characters in the string.