Finding Files on Linux

Find with find

The find command is a pretty basic utility, but it does have loads of options, which may be intimidating at first, but keep in mind it has about every criteria you would possibly need when searching for attributes of files or directories.

It is also the standard way to search files/directories by criteria like name, date created, size, permissions, user, and more.

The syntax and options may seem irregular compared to other commands, but I’ll show a few examples:

Find Examples

List every file and directory recursively under the current directory

find .

Find files under current directory with the name foo

find . -type f -name 'foo'

Find files under /etc/ with the (case-insensitive) pattern bash somewhere in the filename

sudo find /etc/ -type f -iname "*bash*"

Find files in home directory that have been modified in the last 24 hours (Piping commands that produce lots of output to a pager program like less can speed up output significantly)

find $HOME -type f -mtime 0 | less

Execute the file command on every file under current directory and format the output into a table

find . -type f -exec file '{}' \; | column -t -s ":"

Find directories under /etc/ where cron is in the name

sudo find /etc/ -type d -iname '*cron*'

find has lots of options to filter by every file attribute available. But in the majority of cases, we’re interested in finding something by filename, even using fuzzy pattern matching or the universal grep to get what we’re looking for from lots of output.

It may be worth it to check out newer tools such as fzf “the fuzzy finder”, which takes advantage of all the functionality of find, but is more interactive and gives instant visual feedback when filtering files – or any text for that matter. This frees you from doing “manual” regex pattern matching for the name of a file.

It also uses stdin and stdout, so it plays nice with other commands

FZF Examples

Find recently modified files, filter them with fzf and send selected file(s) to stdout

find . -type f -mtime 0 | fzf

Use command substitution to open a file selected with fzf with vim

vim $(fzf)

Of course the big caveat with these extra utilities is that they are almost guaranteed to not be on any machine by default, which is a big thing for POSIX people who like to stick to standard tools.

Then again, these days the process of installing stuff is easier than ever with git, docker images and package managers. There is no harm in trying out these extra tools after learning the standard ones. Who knows? They might even be better, faster or help you work faster.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are machines with very limited environments, where find may not even be there, but that doesn’t mean you can’t search for files with other tools.

Find without find

Step 1

Run any command that recursively lists all files and directories. These include but are not limited to:

Also ls has some filtering/sorting capabilities for file and directory attributes. Using flags like --directory, --file-type, --sort=, --time=, but it not as featured as find when it comes to pruning/filtering output, and the main purpose is just to list directories, so you will have to use other filters to trim down results.

Step 2

Pipe output to grep or less

More Examples

Finding my_file with recursive ls

ls -R | grep my_file

Finding my_file with du

du | grep my_file

Getting a full tree view of all directories with tree

tree | less -R

The -R option tells less to interpret ANSI color codes.