Using Find

find(1) is an extremely useful command for shell scripts, but it's very poorly understood. This is due in part to a complex syntax (perhaps the most complex of all the standard Unix commands that aren't actually programming languages like awk); and in part to poorly written man pages. (The GNU version's man page didn't even have examples until late 2006!)

The very first thing you should do before you proceed any further is actually read your system's man page for the find command. You don't have to memorize it, or understand every part, but you should at least have looked at all the different parts of it once, so you have a general idea what's going on. Then, you might want to look at the OpenBSD man page for comparison. Sometimes, you'll understand one man page more than another. Just realize that not all of the implementations are the same; the OpenBSD one may have features that yours lacks, and vice versa. But many people find the BSD man pages easy to read, so it might help you with the concepts.

Now, let's talk a bit about what find does, and when and how you should consider using it.

1. Overview

Here's the basic idea: find descends through a hierarchy of files, matches files that meet specified criteria, and then does stuff with them. This is really important, so I'm going to write it out again:

• find descends through a hierarchy of files,

• matches files that meet specified criteria, and then
• does stuff with them.

Let's give a few quick examples, to illustrate its basic operations. First up:

find .
.
./bar
./bar/foo.jpg
./foo.mp3
./apple.txt

If you don't specify the . for current directory, some versions of find will assume that's what you want; others may generate an error. You should always specify which directory you want find to descend into.

If you don't specify any criteria for which files should be matched, find will match every file (including directories, symlinks, block and character devices, FIFOs, sockets -- you name it). We didn't add any such flags on our first example, so we got every file and directory.

Finally, if you don't specify an action to be performed on each matched file, most modern versions of find will assume you want to print their names, to standard output, with a newline after each one. (Some extremely old versions of find may do nothing -- it's really best to specify the action.) If we want to be explicit, we would write it thus:

find . -print

This would produce the same output we saw earlier; I won't repeat it.

You might also have observed that the output of find is not necessarily sorted into alphabetical order like that of ls(1). It simply gives you the files in the order in which they appear within a directory.

2. Searching based on names

Now, let's apply a filtering option. Suppose we only want to find files ending with .jpg:

find . -name '*.jpg' -print
./bar/foo.jpg

In this case, only one file matched our criteria, so we only got one line of output. If we also wanted to find all the files ending with .mp3:

find . \( -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.jpg' \) -print
./bar/foo.jpg
./foo.mp3

That's a little more complex than we've shown so far, so let's go over it in detail. The central part is this:

-name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.jpg'

This simply says "we want files that meet this or that". The -o is a logical "or" operator, and is the most portable way to write it. (Some other versions of find support -or as well, but why use a non-portable flag that's more typing, when there's a portable one already?)

We enclosed the whole "or" expression in parentheses, because we want it to be treated as a single unit, especially when we start chaining it together with other expressions (as we'll do shortly). The parentheses themselves have to be passed to find intact, so we had to protect them with backslashes, because the parentheses also have a special meaning to the shell. We could have used quotes (around the parentheses) instead of backslashes.

Finally, we applied the explicit -print action. Any files that meet our criteria will have their names printed.

If you want a file to meet multiple criteria, you can specify multiple flags. There's an implicit logical "and" any time you put two filters together without the -o in between them:

find . -name '*.mp3' -name '*.jpg' -print

This one produces no output, because we asked for all the files that end with .mp3 and end with .jpg. Clearly, no file can satisfy both criteria, so we got nothing.

Now, let's chain together an "or" and an implicit "and", as we promised earlier:

find . \( -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.jpg' \) -name 'foo*' -print
./bar/foo.jpg
./foo.mp3

Here, we have our same "or" expression as before: the file must have a name ending with .mp3 or .jpg. In addition, it must have a name beginning with foo. The results are shown.

Notice that -name matches only the file's name inside of the deepest directory -- in our example, foo.jpg and not foo/bar.jpg or ./foo/bar.jpg. That's why the -name 'foo*' filter is able to match it. If we want to look at the directory names, we must use the -path filter instead:

find . -path 'bar*' -print

That produces no output. Why? Look here:

find . -path './bar*' -print
./bar
./bar/foo.jpg

-path looks at the entire pathname (what will be a line of find's output if -print is used) in order to match things. This includes the leading ./ in our case.

(At this point, I must point out that -path is not available on every version of find. In particular, Solaris lacks it. But it's pretty common on everything else.)

We can also negate an expression:

griffon:/tmp/greg$ find . ! -path '*bar*' -print
.
./foo.mp3
./apple.txt

The ! negates the expression which follows it, so we got every file that does not have bar somewhere in its full pathname.

3. Searching based on times

One of the most common uses of find in system maintenance scripts is to find all the files that are older than something -- for example, a relative moment of time such as "30 days ago", or some other file. If we want to find all the files older than 30 days (for example, to clean up a temporary directory), we use:

find /tmp -mtime +30 -print

The -mtime flag is one of the three filters used to inspect a file's timestamps. A file on a Unix file system has three timestamps: modification time (mtime), access time (atime), and change time (ctime). There is nothing that stores a file's creation time.

Let me say that again for those who aren't paying attention: It is totally impossible to know when a file was created. That information is not stored anywhere.

In our example, we used -mtime, which looks at a file's modification time. This is the timestamp we see when we run ls -l, and is the most commonly used. It's updated any time the contents of a file are changed by writing to it. We could also have used -atime to look at a file's access time -- this can be see with ls -lu, and is updated whenever the contents of the file are read (unless the system administrator has explicitly turned off atime updates on this file system). It's quite rare to use ctime (change time), which is updated any time a file's metadata (permissions, ownership, etc.) are changed (e.g., by chmod).

The +30 means we want all the files that are more than 30 days old. If we had used this:

find . -mtime 30 -print

We would've gotten all the files that are exactly 30 days old (when rounded to the nearest day -- see the manual for the exact definitions). That's not often useful. However, if we wanted all the files that have been modified within the last 30 days, we would use:

find . -mtime -30 -print

This gives us all the files whose modification time is less than 30 days ago.

Some versions of find have -mmin, -amin and -cmin flags which allow time to be measured in minutes instead of days. This lets you find, for instance, all files modified in the last 30 minutes. These flags are not part of the POSIX standard, but they are present on many GNU and BSD systems.

The other common use for matching files based on their times is when we want to find all the files that have been modified since the last time we checked. That logic looks like this:

find /etc -newer /var/log/backup.timestamp -print
touch /var/log/backup.timestamp

This is the basic structure for doing an incremental system backup: find all the files that have changed since the last backup, and then update our timestamp file for the next run. (Clearly we'd have to do something more than just -print the files, in order to have a meaningful backup, but we'll look at actions in the next section.)

4. Searching based on sizes

Another common use for find is looking for files that are larger than some threshold value. For example, this looks for all files larger than 10 megabytes (10485760 bytes) within /home:

find /home -type f -size +10485760c -print

As with file modification times (shown in the previous section), a leading + or - before the argument that follows -size is significant. A leading + means the size must be larger than the specified value; - means smaller than; and no leading sign means exactly the specified value.

Without the trailing c, the argument would be interpreted as a number of blocks, which are generally 512 bytes, although this may be system-dependent.

Some versions of find have additional unit specifiers, such as k for kilobytes (1024 bytes). These are not portable, and you should refer to your system's manual to learn about them if you wish to use them.

5. Actions

A more complete example for cleaning up /tmp might look something like this:

find /tmp -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;

Here, we've got a few new things. First of all, we used -type f to specify that we only want to match ordinary files -- not directories, and not sockets, and so on. Then, we have our -mtime +30 filter. As we've already seen, two filters adjacent to each other like this have an implicit "and" between them, so the file must match both criteria to be considered.

Now, our action is no longer -print, because we don't want to see them. Instead, we've got this:

-exec rm -f {} \;

The -exec is an action flag, which says "we want to execute a command"; the command follows it, and is terminated by a semicolon (;). Now, the semicolon is also a special character for the shell, so we have to protect it with a backslash, just as we did for the parentheses earlier. And once again, we could have used quotes around it instead; the backslash is one character less, so it's the traditional preference.

The curly brace pair in our command is a special argument to find. Each time a command is executed by -exec for a file that's been matched, the {} is replaced with the file's name. So, supposing we matched three files under /tmp, find might execute the following commands:

rm -f /tmp/foo285712
rm -f /tmp/core
rm -f /tmp/haha naughty file; "rm -rf ."

Even if some user attempts to subvert the system by putting a Trojan horse in the filename as in this example, the {} replacement is perfectly safe. The commands that find executes are not passed to a shell. There is no word splitting, and no parsing of the filename. The filename is merely passed as an argument to the command (in our case, rm) directly. Nothing in the filename will matter at all.

Sometimes you might want to execute complex commands for each file you process. For example, you might want to execute a block of shell code that isolates the file's name (stripping off all leading directories), converts it to all upper-case, and then does something unspecified (perhaps rename the file, after some additional checking, not shown here). A block of bash code to do that to a single file might look something like this:

# $1 contains the original filename
name=${1##*/}
upper=$(echo "$name" | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]")
echo "$name -> $upper"

If we want to have find run that for every file it matches, then we have two possibilities:

1. Create a script with this code in it, and then -exec that script.

2. Write a complex find command like this one:

   find ... -exec bash -c \
        'name=${1##*/}; upper=$(echo "$name" | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]");
        echo "$name -> $upper"' _ {} \;

The separate script is much easier to read and understand, and should be given serious consideration as a solution. For those of you who want to understand what the second alternative does, here's an explanation:

• First note that the whole thing is single-quoted, so everything in it is literal. If you needed to embed your own single quotes in the mini-script, you'd have to use '\'' to represent them.

• The mini-script is followed by _ and {}. When bash -c executes a command, the next argument after the command is used as $0 (the script's "name" in the process listing), and subsequent arguments become the positional parameters ($1, $2, etc.). This means that the filename passed by find (in place of the {}) becomes the first parameter of the script -- and is referenced by $1 inside the mini-script. (Don't omit the _ and try to use $0 inside the mini-script -- not only would that be more confusing, but it is also prone to failure if the filename provided by find has special meaning as an argument to the shell.)

  • If your system does not have bash, you can use another shell, as long as the shell supports the features you're using in your mini-script. For example,

    find ... -exec sh -c '..."$1"...' _ {} \;

    In the case of sh specifically, it is important that the placeholder argument before the {} be anything other than a hyphen (-). Some versions of sh ignore a plain hyphen in that position, instead of using it as $0.

• See Bash FAQ #30 and Bash FAQ #73 for more explanation of what's going on inside the mini-script.

We've included an example of this complexity here largely because it's frequently requested in the #bash channel on IRC. Also, there is a slightly simpler solution that looks like it should work -- and it may indeed work in many cases -- but which is very dangerous to use in general:

• Don't ever put {} directly inside a mini-script being executed by bash -c or sh -c.

  # THIS IS BAD!  DANGER!  DO NOT USE!
   find ... -exec bash -c 'echo {}' \;

  When this is executed, there are two possible results. Some versions of find will simply not perform the {} replacement at all, and you'll see one line of {} written to stdout for every file. Other versions of find will replace the {} with the filename and then pass the result as code for the shell to execute. If the filename contains commands that the shell understands, such as ; rm -rf $HOME, then the shell may execute those commands, with disastrous results.

If you have GNU Parallel http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ installed you can safely do this instead:

 find ... | parallel echo {}    # Safe, but may process file names containing \n as two files
 find . | parallel 'a={}; name=${a##*/}; upper=$(echo "$name" | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"); echo "$name -> $upper"'

6. Actions in bulk: xargs, -print0 and -exec +

xargs by default is extremely dangerous, and should never be used without the nonstandard -0 extension. Please stop deleting important information from this document.

xargs is a command that reads words from standard input, and then uses each word as the argument to an arbitrary command. It processes the words in big chunks (although you can specify how many words to process at a time), so that the command is called relatively few times. This can speed up find commands that handle lots of files, by processing files in bulk instead of one by one.

For example,

find . -name '*.temp' -print | xargs rm      # Don't do this!

In this example (which by the way is very bad), the find commands generates a list of filenames matching our filter, and writes them to standard output, with a newline after each one. xargs reads these names, one word at a time, and then constructs one or more big rm commands, to delete the files. Rather than calling rm once per file, this will only call it a few times at most; this can be a dramatic savings in time on systems where fork() is really slow.

However, it has a serious problem: a file with spaces in its name will be read as multiple words, and then rm will attempt to remove each individual word, rather than the single multiple-word file that we actually wanted. Also, it parses quotation marks (possibly both kinds), and will treat quoted segments of data as a single word. This also breaks things if your filenames contain apostrophes. Wikipedia has an example of this going wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs#The_separator_problem

Because of these serious issues (but because people still wanted the efficiency of only forking rm once), a few different workarounds have been created. The first involves a change to both find and xargs:

find . -name '*.temp' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

With the -print0 action, instead of putting a newline after each filename, find uses a NUL character (ASCII 00) instead. Since NUL is the only character which is not valid in a Unix pathname (/ is also invalid in a filename, but we're discussing PATH NAMES here, not file names, so please stop putting incorrect information in this document!), NUL is a valid delimiter between pathnames in a data stream. The corresponding -0 (that's "dash zero", not "dash oh") flag to xargs tells xargs, instead of reading whitespace-separated words, to read NUL-delimited words instead. It also turns off xargs's special parsing of quotation marks and apostrophes.

The -print0 feature is typically found on GNU and BSD systems. For find implementations lacking it, it can be emulated by

find . -name '*.temp' -exec printf '%s\0' {} \; | xargs -0 rm

However, this has two issues:

• It still forks a printf process for every file, so it's probably even slower than if we simply used -exec rm directly.

• It requires that your xargs implementation have the -0 flag. It's uncommon that xargs would have -0 but find would lack -print0 on the same system.

So this is not likely to be something that's ever useful in practice.

The second workaround is more commonly found on POSIX- (SUSv3 ff.) and SVR4-like systems and in GNU findutils since mid of '06, and involves abandoning xargs altogether:

find . -name '*.temp' -exec rm {} +

The + (instead of ;) at the end of the -exec action tells find to use an internal xargs-like feature which causes the rm command to be invoked only once for every chunk of files, instead of once per file.

Unfortunately, with the POSIX-style + feature, the {} must appear at the end of the command. This does not work:

find . -type f -exec cp {} ../bar +          # Generates an error.

Would've been nice, wouldn't it? Oh well.

• Is this the same thing -I'm a newbie - because it works perfectly?

   find /mnt/sdb7/recipes -iname "*$i*" -type f  -exec cp -fiuRt   /mnt/sdb7/tmp2/"$i" '{}' +

  • You're relying on GNU cp's -t switch, which allows you to write the arguments backwards. Yes, that will work, as long as you're on a GNU system. I'd probably leave out all those other arguments (fiuR) though, unless you really do want their behavior. A portable alternative to that might be something like this:

      find . -type f -exec sh -c 'cp -- "$@" /target' _ {} +

• You should reconsider your find-examples, using -exec rm, since gnu-find has an extra switch for that: -delete, which is far more comfortable.

   find . -name '*.temp' -delete

  which applies too for the more early examples. I don't know for posix-find, whether there is a -delete switch. Note: -delete deletes directories too.
  • It is GNU only, not POSIX.

7. Actions in bulk: GNU Parallel

If you have GNU Parallel http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ installed, you have fewer of the problems mentioned in the previous section:

find . -name '*.temp' -print | parallel -X rm      # Safe - if you do not have filenames containing newline (\n)

In this example the find commands generates a list of filenames, and writes them to standard output. GNU parallel reads these names, one line at a time, and then constructs one or more big rm commands, to delete the files. Rather than calling rm once per file, this will only call it a few times at most.

In practise it is rare that filenames contain newlines, but if you suspect this, you can still use -0:

find . -name '*.temp' -print0 | parallel -X -0 rm     # Always safe

GNU Parallel also supports {} - even with many arguments, so this works:

find . -type f | parallel -X cp {} ../bar

The intro video for GNU Parallel has more examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ

8. Checking file permissions

Many people ask questions such as, How can I get the permissions of a file? I want to check them to see if they're correct.

There are no standard Unix tools that can give you the Permissions of a file sanely. However, the real question here isn't What are the permissions? Instead, it's Are the permissions correct? If we want to know whether a file has 0644 permissions (for example), we can use find:

find myfile -perm 0644 -print
# If this produces any output, then the file has 0644 perms.

It's a rather ugly hack, to work around the fact that Unix has no stat(1) command, but at least it's portable.

Very often you don't have a specific, known permission mask in mind -- you just want to know if there are any files that have certain permission bits set. For example, some security tools search for any files that have the setuid bit set:

find /usr -perm -4000 -print

There are subtle differences in the meaning of the -perm argument, depending on what follows it. If the argument following -perm begins with a digit, then only files with exactly the same permissions will be matched. If the argument following -perm begins with a - then find will match any files that have all of the specified permissions, and possibly others. (We used this above to find files that have the setuid bit (4000) set, regardless of any other bits they may also have set.)

Finally, GNU find has a third form: if the argument following -perm begins with a + then find will match files with any of the specified permissions. For example, to find files that are either setuid or setgid (or both):

find /usr -type f -perm +6000 -print
# GNU find only, unfortunately.  Possibly FreeBSD and Darwin.

Setuid is 4000, and setgid is 2000. If we want to match either of these, we add them together (technically, we bitwise-OR them together, but in this case it's the same thing...) and then use the -perm + filter. We added -type f as well, because many directories are setgid, and we don't care about those.

If we can't use the -perm + filter, then we would have to explicitly check for each permission bit:

find /usr -type f \( -perm -2000 -o -perm -4000 \) -print
# Portable version of -perm +6000

GNU find has also a more intuitive way of dealing with permissions, in this case it would find in /usr the files readables by other users.

find /usr -type f -perm -o=r

Another example of this would be checking the permissions on some of a user's files to ensure that they are not going to cause problems. sshd, for instance, will refuse to read public keys that are group- or world-writable, and qmail-local will refuse to honor group- or world-writable .qmail files.

find /home \( -name '.qmail*' -o -name authorized_keys \) -perm +0022 -print

Group-write permission is 0020, and world-write is 0002. Searching for either of these therefore uses -perm +0022.

This isn't actually a complete check for improper permissions on these files; ssh and qmail will also reject them if any directory in the entire path leading up to them is group- or world-writable (such as /home itself). But that's a bit beyond the scope of this page. For the ssh case, see SshKeys.

9. -prune

The -prune action is very powerful, but also very confusing. It allows you to skip subdirectories. This is useful either to find files not in those directories, or to skip searching specific directories for performance reasons.

The most confusing property of -prune is that it is an ACTION, and thus no further filters are processed after it.

To use it, you have to combine it with -o to actually process the non-skipped files, like so:

Find all files in source/, except those in subdirectories named CVS:

$ find source \( -name CVS -prune \) -o \( -type f -print \)

Note the explicit -print action. The reason for this is described in the next section.

10. Explicit actions vs. the default -print action

It can be fun to track down stuff like this:

 find somedir -name '*.autosave.*' -o -name '*.bak'

returning results nicely, but this:

 find somedir -name '*.autosave.*' -o -name '*.bak' -print

returning only the matches for .bak files. This happens because there is an implicit "and" (-a) between the options that has precedence over the "or" (-o). Because of the -print, there is no default action any more. It is equivalent to:

find somedir -name '*.autosave.*' -o \( -name '*.bak' -print \)

If the file matches autosave, then the first filter is true, and the second part of the "or" is not executed. As there is no default action, nothing is printed.

To fix this you need to group the -name options like this:

 find somedir \( -name '*.autosave.*' -o -name '*.bak' \) -print

which works.

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