github.com/lmorg/murex@v0.0.0-20240217211045-e081c89cd4ef/utils/man/test_find.txt (about) 1 FIND(1) General Commands Manual FIND(1) 2 3 NAME 4 find - search for files in a directory hierarchy 5 6 SYNOPSIS 7 find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D debugopts] [-Olevel] [starting-point...] [expression] 8 9 DESCRIPTION 10 This manual page documents the GNU version of find. GNU find searches the directory tree rooted at each given starting-point by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence (see 11 section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for or), at which point find moves on to the next file name. If no starting-point is specified, ‘.' is assumed. 12 13 If you are using find in an environment where security is important (for example if you are using it to search directories that are writable by other users), you should read the ‘Security Considerations' chapter of the findu‐ 14 tils documentation, which is called Finding Files and comes with findutils. That document also includes a lot more detail and discussion than this manual page, so you may find it a more useful source of information. 15 16 OPTIONS 17 The -H, -L and -P options control the treatment of symbolic links. Command-line arguments following these are taken to be names of files or directories to be examined, up to the first argument that begins with ‘-', or the ar‐ 18 gument ‘(' or ‘!'. That argument and any following arguments are taken to be the expression describing what is to be searched for. If no paths are given, the current directory is used. If no expression is given, the expres‐ 19 sion -print is used (but you should probably consider using -print0 instead, anyway). 20 21 This manual page talks about ‘options' within the expression list. These options control the behaviour of find but are specified immediately after the last path name. The five ‘real' options -H, -L, -P, -D and -O must appear 22 before the first path name, if at all. A double dash -- could theoretically be used to signal that any remaining arguments are not options, but this does not really work due to the way find determines the end of the following 23 path arguments: it does that by reading until an expression argument comes (which also starts with a ‘-'). Now, if a path argument would start with a ‘-', then find would treat it as expression argument instead. Thus, to en‐ 24 sure that all start points are taken as such, and especially to prevent that wildcard patterns expanded by the calling shell are not mistakenly treated as expression arguments, it is generally safer to prefix wildcards or du‐ 25 bious path names with either ‘./' or to use absolute path names starting with '/'. Alternatively, it is generally safe though non-portable to use the GNU option -files0-from to pass arbitrary starting points to find. 26 27 -P Never follow symbolic links. This is the default behaviour. When find examines or prints information about files, and the file is a symbolic link, the information used shall be taken from the properties of the sym‐ 28 bolic link itself. 29 30 -L Follow symbolic links. When find examines or prints information about files, the information used shall be taken from the properties of the file to which the link points, not from the link itself (unless it is a broken 31 symbolic link or find is unable to examine the file to which the link points). Use of this option implies -noleaf. If you later use the -P option, -noleaf will still be in effect. If -L is in effect and find discov‐ 32 ers a symbolic link to a subdirectory during its search, the subdirectory pointed to by the symbolic link will be searched. 33 34 When the -L option is in effect, the -type predicate will always match against the type of the file that a symbolic link points to rather than the link itself (unless the symbolic link is broken). Actions that can 35 cause symbolic links to become broken while find is executing (for example -delete) can give rise to confusing behaviour. Using -L causes the -lname and -ilname predicates always to return false. 36 37 -H Do not follow symbolic links, except while processing the command line arguments. When find examines or prints information about files, the information used shall be taken from the properties of the symbolic link it‐ 38 self. The only exception to this behaviour is when a file specified on the command line is a symbolic link, and the link can be resolved. For that situation, the information used is taken from whatever the link points 39 to (that is, the link is followed). The information about the link itself is used as a fallback if the file pointed to by the symbolic link cannot be examined. If -H is in effect and one of the paths specified on the 40 command line is a symbolic link to a directory, the contents of that directory will be examined (though of course -maxdepth 0 would prevent this). 41 42 If more than one of -H, -L and -P is specified, each overrides the others; the last one appearing on the command line takes effect. Since it is the default, the -P option should be considered to be in effect unless either -H 43 or -L is specified. 44 45 GNU find frequently stats files during the processing of the command line itself, before any searching has begun. These options also affect how those arguments are processed. Specifically, there are a number of tests that 46 compare files listed on the command line against a file we are currently considering. In each case, the file specified on the command line will have been examined and some of its properties will have been saved. If the named 47 file is in fact a symbolic link, and the -P option is in effect (or if neither -H nor -L were specified), the information used for the comparison will be taken from the properties of the symbolic link. Otherwise, it will be 48 taken from the properties of the file the link points to. If find cannot follow the link (for example because it has insufficient privileges or the link points to a nonexistent file) the properties of the link itself will be 49 used. 50 51 When the -H or -L options are in effect, any symbolic links listed as the argument of -newer will be dereferenced, and the timestamp will be taken from the file to which the symbolic link points. The same consideration ap‐ 52 plies to -newerXY, -anewer and -cnewer. 53 54 The -follow option has a similar effect to -L, though it takes effect at the point where it appears (that is, if -L is not used but -follow is, any symbolic links appearing after -follow on the command line will be derefer‐ 55 enced, and those before it will not). 56 57 -D debugopts 58 Print diagnostic information; this can be helpful to diagnose problems with why find is not doing what you want. The list of debug options should be comma separated. Compatibility of the debug options is not guaran‐ 59 teed between releases of findutils. For a complete list of valid debug options, see the output of find -D help. Valid debug options include 60 61 exec Show diagnostic information relating to -exec, -execdir, -ok and -okdir 62 63 opt Prints diagnostic information relating to the optimisation of the expression tree; see the -O option. 64 65 rates Prints a summary indicating how often each predicate succeeded or failed. 66 67 search Navigate the directory tree verbosely. 68 69 stat Print messages as files are examined with the stat and lstat system calls. The find program tries to minimise such calls. 70 71 tree Show the expression tree in its original and optimised form. 72 73 all Enable all of the other debug options (but help). 74 75 help Explain the debugging options. 76 77 -Olevel 78 Enables query optimisation. The find program reorders tests to speed up execution while preserving the overall effect; that is, predicates with side effects are not reordered relative to each other. The optimisations 79 performed at each optimisation level are as follows. 80 81 0 Equivalent to optimisation level 1. 82 83 1 This is the default optimisation level and corresponds to the traditional behaviour. Expressions are reordered so that tests based only on the names of files (for example -name and -regex) are performed first. 84 85 2 Any -type or -xtype tests are performed after any tests based only on the names of files, but before any tests that require information from the inode. On many modern versions of Unix, file types are returned by 86 readdir() and so these predicates are faster to evaluate than predicates which need to stat the file first. If you use the -fstype FOO predicate and specify a filesystem type FOO which is not known (that is, 87 present in ‘/etc/mtab') at the time find starts, that predicate is equivalent to -false. 88 89 3 At this optimisation level, the full cost-based query optimiser is enabled. The order of tests is modified so that cheap (i.e. fast) tests are performed first and more expensive ones are performed later, if nec‐ 90 essary. Within each cost band, predicates are evaluated earlier or later according to whether they are likely to succeed or not. For -o, predicates which are likely to succeed are evaluated earlier, and for -a, 91 predicates which are likely to fail are evaluated earlier. 92 93 The cost-based optimiser has a fixed idea of how likely any given test is to succeed. In some cases the probability takes account of the specific nature of the test (for example, -type f is assumed to be more likely to 94 succeed than -type c). The cost-based optimiser is currently being evaluated. If it does not actually improve the performance of find, it will be removed again. Conversely, optimisations that prove to be reliable, 95 robust and effective may be enabled at lower optimisation levels over time. However, the default behaviour (i.e. optimisation level 1) will not be changed in the 4.3.x release series. The findutils test suite runs all 96 the tests on find at each optimisation level and ensures that the result is the same. 97 98 EXPRESSION 99 The part of the command line after the list of starting points is the expression. This is a kind of query specification describing how we match files and what we do with the files that were matched. An expression is composed 100 of a sequence of things: 101 102 Tests Tests return a true or false value, usually on the basis of some property of a file we are considering. The -empty test for example is true only when the current file is empty. 103 104 Actions 105 Actions have side effects (such as printing something on the standard output) and return either true or false, usually based on whether or not they are successful. The -print action for example prints the name of the 106 current file on the standard output. 107 108 Global options 109 Global options affect the operation of tests and actions specified on any part of the command line. Global options always return true. The -depth option for example makes find traverse the file system in a depth-first 110 order. 111 112 Positional options 113 Positional options affect only tests or actions which follow them. Positional options always return true. The -regextype option for example is positional, specifying the regular expression dialect for regular expres‐ 114 sions occurring later on the command line. 115 116 Operators 117 Operators join together the other items within the expression. They include for example -o (meaning logical OR) and -a (meaning logical AND). Where an operator is missing, -a is assumed. 118 119 The -print action is performed on all files for which the whole expression is true, unless it contains an action other than -prune or -quit. Actions which inhibit the default -print are -delete, -exec, -execdir, -ok, -okdir, 120 -fls, -fprint, -fprintf, -ls, -print and -printf. 121 122 The -delete action also acts like an option (since it implies -depth). 123 124 POSITIONAL OPTIONS 125 Positional options always return true. They affect only tests occurring later on the command line. 126 127 -daystart 128 Measure times (for -amin, -atime, -cmin, -ctime, -mmin, and -mtime) from the beginning of today rather than from 24 hours ago. This option only affects tests which appear later on the command line. 129 130 -follow 131 Deprecated; use the -L option instead. Dereference symbolic links. Implies -noleaf. The -follow option affects only those tests which appear after it on the command line. Unless the -H or -L option has been speci‐ 132 fied, the position of the -follow option changes the behaviour of the -newer predicate; any files listed as the argument of -newer will be dereferenced if they are symbolic links. The same consideration applies to 133 -newerXY, -anewer and -cnewer. Similarly, the -type predicate will always match against the type of the file that a symbolic link points to rather than the link itself. Using -follow causes the -lname and -ilname 134 predicates always to return false. 135 136 -regextype type 137 Changes the regular expression syntax understood by -regex and -iregex tests which occur later on the command line. To see which regular expression types are known, use -regextype help. The Texinfo documentation (see 138 SEE ALSO) explains the meaning of and differences between the various types of regular expression. 139 140 -warn, -nowarn 141 Turn warning messages on or off. These warnings apply only to the command line usage, not to any conditions that find might encounter when it searches directories. The default behaviour corresponds to -warn if stan‐ 142 dard input is a tty, and to -nowarn otherwise. If a warning message relating to command-line usage is produced, the exit status of find is not affected. If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, and -warn is 143 also used, it is not specified which, if any, warnings will be active. 144 145 GLOBAL OPTIONS 146 Global options always return true. Global options take effect even for tests which occur earlier on the command line. To prevent confusion, global options should specified on the command-line after the list of start points, 147 just before the first test, positional option or action. If you specify a global option in some other place, find will issue a warning message explaining that this can be confusing. 148 149 The global options occur after the list of start points, and so are not the same kind of option as -L, for example. 150 151 -d A synonym for -depth, for compatibility with FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOS X and OpenBSD. 152 153 -depth Process each directory's contents before the directory itself. The -delete action also implies -depth. 154 155 -files0-from file 156 Read the starting points from file instead of getting them on the command line. In contrast to the known limitations of passing starting points via arguments on the command line, namely the limitation of the amount of 157 file names, and the inherent ambiguity of file names clashing with option names, using this option allows to safely pass an arbitrary number of starting points to find. 158 159 Using this option and passing starting points on the command line is mutually exclusive, and is therefore not allowed at the same time. 160 161 The file argument is mandatory. One can use -files0-from - to read the list of starting points from the standard input stream, and e.g. from a pipe. In this case, the actions -ok and -okdir are not allowed, because 162 they would obviously interfere with reading from standard input in order to get a user confirmation. 163 164 The starting points in file have to be separated by ASCII NUL characters. Two consecutive NUL characters, i.e., a starting point with a Zero-length file name is not allowed and will lead to an error diagnostic followed 165 by a non-Zero exit code later. 166 167 In the case the given file is empty, find does not process any starting point and therefore will exit immediately after parsing the program arguments. This is unlike the standard invocation where find assumes the cur‐ 168 rent directory as starting point if no path argument is passed. 169 170 The processing of the starting points is otherwise as usual, e.g. find will recurse into subdirectories unless otherwise prevented. To process only the starting points, one can additionally pass -maxdepth 0. 171 172 Further notes: if a file is listed more than once in the input file, it is unspecified whether it is visited more than once. If the file is mutated during the operation of find, the result is unspecified as well. Fi‐ 173 nally, the seek position within the named file at the time find exits, be it with -quit or in any other way, is also unspecified. By "unspecified" here is meant that it may or may not work or do any specific thing, and 174 that the behavior may change from platform to platform, or from findutils release to release. 175 176 -help, --help 177 Print a summary of the command-line usage of find and exit. 178 179 -ignore_readdir_race 180 Normally, find will emit an error message when it fails to stat a file. If you give this option and a file is deleted between the time find reads the name of the file from the directory and the time it tries to stat 181 the file, no error message will be issued. This also applies to files or directories whose names are given on the command line. This option takes effect at the time the command line is read, which means that you can‐ 182 not search one part of the filesystem with this option on and part of it with this option off (if you need to do that, you will need to issue two find commands instead, one with the option and one without it). 183 184 Furthermore, find with the -ignore_readdir_race option will ignore errors of the -delete action in the case the file has disappeared since the parent directory was read: it will not output an error diagnostic, and the 185 return code of the -delete action will be true. 186 187 -maxdepth levels 188 Descend at most levels (a non-negative integer) levels of directories below the starting-points. Using -maxdepth 0 means only apply the tests and actions to the starting-points themselves. 189 190 -mindepth levels 191 Do not apply any tests or actions at levels less than levels (a non-negative integer). Using -mindepth 1 means process all files except the starting-points. 192 193 -mount Don't descend directories on other filesystems. An alternate name for -xdev, for compatibility with some other versions of find. 194 195 -noignore_readdir_race 196 Turns off the effect of -ignore_readdir_race. 197 198 -noleaf 199 Do not optimize by assuming that directories contain 2 fewer subdirectories than their hard link count. This option is needed when searching filesystems that do not follow the Unix directory-link convention, such as 200 CD-ROM or MS-DOS filesystems or AFS volume mount points. Each directory on a normal Unix filesystem has at least 2 hard links: its name and its ‘.' entry. Additionally, its subdirectories (if any) each have a ‘..' en‐ 201 try linked to that directory. When find is examining a directory, after it has statted 2 fewer subdirectories than the directory's link count, it knows that the rest of the entries in the directory are non-directories 202 (‘leaf' files in the directory tree). If only the files' names need to be examined, there is no need to stat them; this gives a significant increase in search speed. 203 204 -version, --version 205 Print the find version number and exit. 206 207 -xdev Don't descend directories on other filesystems. 208 209 TESTS 210 Some tests, for example -newerXY and -samefile, allow comparison between the file currently being examined and some reference file specified on the command line. When these tests are used, the interpretation of the reference 211 file is determined by the options -H, -L and -P and any previous -follow, but the reference file is only examined once, at the time the command line is parsed. If the reference file cannot be examined (for example, the 212 stat(2) system call fails for it), an error message is issued, and find exits with a nonzero status. 213 214 A numeric argument n can be specified to tests (like -amin, -mtime, -gid, -inum, -links, -size, -uid and -used) as 215 216 +n for greater than n, 217 218 -n for less than n, 219 220 n for exactly n. 221 222 Supported tests: 223 224 -amin n 225 File was last accessed less than, more than or exactly n minutes ago. 226 227 -anewer reference 228 Time of the last access of the current file is more recent than that of the last data modification of the reference file. If reference is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in effect, then the time 229 of the last data modification of the file it points to is always used. 230 231 -atime n 232 File was last accessed less than, more than or exactly n*24 hours ago. When find figures out how many 24-hour periods ago the file was last accessed, any fractional part is ignored, so to match -atime +1, a file has to 233 have been accessed at least two days ago. 234 235 -cmin n 236 File's status was last changed less than, more than or exactly n minutes ago. 237 238 -cnewer reference 239 Time of the last status change of the current file is more recent than that of the last data modification of the reference file. If reference is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in effect, then the 240 time of the last data modification of the file it points to is always used. 241 242 -ctime n 243 File's status was last changed less than, more than or exactly n*24 hours ago. See the comments for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of file status change times. 244 245 -empty File is empty and is either a regular file or a directory. 246 247 -executable 248 Matches files which are executable and directories which are searchable (in a file name resolution sense) by the current user. This takes into account access control lists and other permissions artefacts which the 249 -perm test ignores. This test makes use of the access(2) system call, and so can be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squashing), since many systems implement access(2) in the client's kernel and so 250 cannot make use of the UID mapping information held on the server. Because this test is based only on the result of the access(2) system call, there is no guarantee that a file for which this test succeeds can actually 251 be executed. 252 253 -false Always false. 254 255 -fstype type 256 File is on a filesystem of type type. The valid filesystem types vary among different versions of Unix; an incomplete list of filesystem types that are accepted on some version of Unix or another is: ufs, 4.2, 4.3, 257 nfs, tmp, mfs, S51K, S52K. You can use -printf with the %F directive to see the types of your filesystems. 258 259 -gid n File's numeric group ID is less than, more than or exactly n. 260 261 -group gname 262 File belongs to group gname (numeric group ID allowed). 263 264 -ilname pattern 265 Like -lname, but the match is case insensitive. If the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, this test returns false unless the symbolic link is broken. 266 267 -iname pattern 268 Like -name, but the match is case insensitive. For example, the patterns ‘fo*' and ‘F??' match the file names ‘Foo', ‘FOO', ‘foo', ‘fOo', etc. The pattern ‘*foo*‘ will also match a file called '.foobar'. 269 270 -inum n 271 File has inode number smaller than, greater than or exactly n. It is normally easier to use the -samefile test instead. 272 273 -ipath pattern 274 Like -path. but the match is case insensitive. 275 276 -iregex pattern 277 Like -regex, but the match is case insensitive. 278 279 -iwholename pattern 280 See -ipath. This alternative is less portable than -ipath. 281 282 -links n 283 File has less than, more than or exactly n hard links. 284 285 -lname pattern 286 File is a symbolic link whose contents match shell pattern pattern. The metacharacters do not treat ‘/' or ‘.' specially. If the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, this test returns false unless the sym‐ 287 bolic link is broken. 288 289 -mmin n 290 File's data was last modified less than, more than or exactly n minutes ago. 291 292 -mtime n 293 File's data was last modified less than, more than or exactly n*24 hours ago. See the comments for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of file modification times. 294 295 -name pattern 296 Base of file name (the path with the leading directories removed) matches shell pattern pattern. Because the leading directories are removed, the file names considered for a match with -name will never include a slash, 297 so ‘-name a/b' will never match anything (you probably need to use -path instead). A warning is issued if you try to do this, unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. The metacharacters (‘*', ‘?', and 298 ‘[]') match a ‘.' at the start of the base name (this is a change in findutils-4.2.2; see section STANDARDS CONFORMANCE below). To ignore a directory and the files under it, use -prune rather than checking every file 299 in the tree; see an example in the description of that action. Braces are not recognised as being special, despite the fact that some shells including Bash imbue braces with a special meaning in shell patterns. The 300 filename matching is performed with the use of the fnmatch(3) library function. Don't forget to enclose the pattern in quotes in order to protect it from expansion by the shell. 301 302 -newer reference 303 Time of the last data modification of the current file is more recent than that of the last data modification of the reference file. If reference is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in effect, then 304 the time of the last data modification of the file it points to is always used. 305 306 -newerXY reference 307 Succeeds if timestamp X of the file being considered is newer than timestamp Y of the file reference. The letters X and Y can be any of the following letters: 308 309 a The access time of the file reference 310 B The birth time of the file reference 311 c The inode status change time of reference 312 m The modification time of the file reference 313 t reference is interpreted directly as a time 314 315 Some combinations are invalid; for example, it is invalid for X to be t. Some combinations are not implemented on all systems; for example B is not supported on all systems. If an invalid or unsupported combination of 316 XY is specified, a fatal error results. Time specifications are interpreted as for the argument to the -d option of GNU date. If you try to use the birth time of a reference file, and the birth time cannot be deter‐ 317 mined, a fatal error message results. If you specify a test which refers to the birth time of files being examined, this test will fail for any files where the birth time is unknown. 318 319 -nogroup 320 No group corresponds to file's numeric group ID. 321 322 -nouser 323 No user corresponds to file's numeric user ID. 324 325 -path pattern 326 File name matches shell pattern pattern. The metacharacters do not treat ‘/' or ‘.' specially; so, for example, 327 find . -path "./sr*sc" 328 will print an entry for a directory called ./src/misc (if one exists). To ignore a whole directory tree, use -prune rather than checking every file in the tree. Note that the pattern match test applies to the whole 329 file name, starting from one of the start points named on the command line. It would only make sense to use an absolute path name here if the relevant start point is also an absolute path. This means that this command 330 will never match anything: 331 find bar -path /foo/bar/myfile -print 332 Find compares the -path argument with the concatenation of a directory name and the base name of the file it's examining. Since the concatenation will never end with a slash, -path arguments ending in a slash will 333 match nothing (except perhaps a start point specified on the command line). The predicate -path is also supported by HP-UX find and is part of the POSIX 2008 standard. 334 335 -perm mode 336 File's permission bits are exactly mode (octal or symbolic). Since an exact match is required, if you want to use this form for symbolic modes, you may have to specify a rather complex mode string. For example ‘-perm 337 g=w' will only match files which have mode 0020 (that is, ones for which group write permission is the only permission set). It is more likely that you will want to use the ‘/' or ‘-' forms, for example ‘-perm -g=w', 338 which matches any file with group write permission. See the EXAMPLES section for some illustrative examples. 339 340 -perm -mode 341 All of the permission bits mode are set for the file. Symbolic modes are accepted in this form, and this is usually the way in which you would want to use them. You must specify ‘u', ‘g' or ‘o' if you use a symbolic 342 mode. See the EXAMPLES section for some illustrative examples. 343 344 -perm /mode 345 Any of the permission bits mode are set for the file. Symbolic modes are accepted in this form. You must specify ‘u', ‘g' or ‘o' if you use a symbolic mode. See the EXAMPLES section for some illustrative examples. 346 If no permission bits in mode are set, this test matches any file (the idea here is to be consistent with the behaviour of -perm -000). 347 348 -perm +mode 349 This is no longer supported (and has been deprecated since 2005). Use -perm /mode instead. 350 351 -readable 352 Matches files which are readable by the current user. This takes into account access control lists and other permissions artefacts which the -perm test ignores. This test makes use of the access(2) system call, and so 353 can be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squashing), since many systems implement access(2) in the client's kernel and so cannot make use of the UID mapping information held on the server. 354 355 -regex pattern 356 File name matches regular expression pattern. This is a match on the whole path, not a search. For example, to match a file named ./fubar3, you can use the regular expression ‘.*bar.' or ‘.*b.*3', but not ‘f.*r3'. 357 The regular expressions understood by find are by default Emacs Regular Expressions (except that ‘.' matches newline), but this can be changed with the -regextype option. 358 359 -samefile name 360 File refers to the same inode as name. When -L is in effect, this can include symbolic links. 361 362 -size n[cwbkMG] 363 File uses less than, more than or exactly n units of space, rounding up. The following suffixes can be used: 364 365 ‘b' for 512-byte blocks (this is the default if no suffix is used) 366 367 ‘c' for bytes 368 369 ‘w' for two-byte words 370 371 ‘k' for kibibytes (KiB, units of 1024 bytes) 372 373 ‘M' for mebibytes (MiB, units of 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 bytes) 374 375 ‘G' for gibibytes (GiB, units of 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1073741824 bytes) 376 377 The size is simply the st_size member of the struct stat populated by the lstat (or stat) system call, rounded up as shown above. In other words, it's consistent with the result you get for ls -l. Bear in mind that 378 the ‘%k' and ‘%b' format specifiers of -printf handle sparse files differently. The ‘b' suffix always denotes 512-byte blocks and never 1024-byte blocks, which is different to the behaviour of -ls. 379 380 The + and - prefixes signify greater than and less than, as usual; i.e., an exact size of n units does not match. Bear in mind that the size is rounded up to the next unit. Therefore -size -1M is not equivalent to 381 -size -1048576c. The former only matches empty files, the latter matches files from 0 to 1,048,575 bytes. 382 383 -true Always true. 384 385 -type c 386 File is of type c: 387 388 b block (buffered) special 389 390 c character (unbuffered) special 391 392 d directory 393 394 p named pipe (FIFO) 395 396 f regular file 397 398 l symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, unless the symbolic link is broken. If you want to search for symbolic links when -L is in effect, use -xtype. 399 400 s socket 401 402 D door (Solaris) 403 404 To search for more than one type at once, you can supply the combined list of type letters separated by a comma ‘,' (GNU extension). 405 406 -uid n File's numeric user ID is less than, more than or exactly n. 407 408 -used n 409 File was last accessed less than, more than or exactly n days after its status was last changed. 410 411 -user uname 412 File is owned by user uname (numeric user ID allowed). 413 414 -wholename pattern 415 See -path. This alternative is less portable than -path. 416 417 -writable 418 Matches files which are writable by the current user. This takes into account access control lists and other permissions artefacts which the -perm test ignores. This test makes use of the access(2) system call, and so 419 can be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squashing), since many systems implement access(2) in the client's kernel and so cannot make use of the UID mapping information held on the server. 420 421 -xtype c 422 The same as -type unless the file is a symbolic link. For symbolic links: if the -H or -P option was specified, true if the file is a link to a file of type c; if the -L option has been given, true if c is ‘l'. In 423 other words, for symbolic links, -xtype checks the type of the file that -type does not check. 424 425 -context pattern 426 (SELinux only) Security context of the file matches glob pattern. 427 428 ACTIONS 429 -delete 430 Delete files or directories; true if removal succeeded. If the removal failed, an error message is issued and find's exit status will be nonzero (when it eventually exits). 431 432 Warning: Don't forget that find evaluates the command line as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified. 433 434 The use of the -delete action on the command line automatically turns on the -depth option. As in turn -depth makes -prune ineffective, the -delete action cannot usefully be combined with -prune. 435 436 Often, the user might want to test a find command line with -print prior to adding -delete for the actual removal run. To avoid surprising results, it is usually best to remember to use -depth explicitly during those 437 earlier test runs. 438 439 The -delete action will fail to remove a directory unless it is empty. 440 441 Together with the -ignore_readdir_race option, find will ignore errors of the -delete action in the case the file has disappeared since the parent directory was read: it will not output an error diagnostic, not change 442 the exit code to nonzero, and the return code of the -delete action will be true. 443 444 -exec command ; 445 Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following arguments to find are taken to be arguments to the command until an argument consisting of ‘;' is encountered. The string ‘{}' is replaced by the current 446 file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just in arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these constructions might need to be escaped (with a ‘\') or 447 quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES section for examples of the use of the -exec option. The specified command is run once for each matched file. The command is executed in the start‐ 448 ing directory. There are unavoidable security problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should use the -execdir option instead. 449 450 -exec command {} + 451 This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be 452 much less than the number of matched files. The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of ‘{}' is allowed within the command, and it must appear at the end, 453 immediately before the ‘+'; it needs to be escaped (with a ‘\') or quoted to protect it from interpretation by the shell. The command is executed in the starting directory. If any invocation with the ‘+' form returns 454 a non-zero value as exit status, then find returns a non-zero exit status. If find encounters an error, this can sometimes cause an immediate exit, so some pending commands may not be run at all. For this reason 455 -exec my-command ... {} + -quit may not result in my-command actually being run. This variant of -exec always returns true. 456 457 -execdir command ; 458 459 -execdir command {} + 460 Like -exec, but the specified command is run from the subdirectory containing the matched file, which is not normally the directory in which you started find. As with -exec, the {} should be quoted if find is being in‐ 461 voked from a shell. This a much more secure method for invoking commands, as it avoids race conditions during resolution of the paths to the matched files. As with the -exec action, the ‘+' form of -execdir will build 462 a command line to process more than one matched file, but any given invocation of command will only list files that exist in the same subdirectory. If you use this option, you must ensure that your PATH environment 463 variable does not reference ‘.'; otherwise, an attacker can run any commands they like by leaving an appropriately-named file in a directory in which you will run -execdir. The same applies to having entries in PATH 464 which are empty or which are not absolute directory names. If any invocation with the ‘+' form returns a non-zero value as exit status, then find returns a non-zero exit status. If find encounters an error, this can 465 sometimes cause an immediate exit, so some pending commands may not be run at all. The result of the action depends on whether the + or the ; variant is being used; -execdir command {} + always returns true, while -ex‐ 466 ecdir command {} ; returns true only if command returns 0. 467 468 -fls file 469 True; like -ls but write to file like -fprint. The output file is always created, even if the predicate is never matched. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual characters in filenames are 470 handled. 471 472 -fprint file 473 True; print the full file name into file file. If file does not exist when find is run, it is created; if it does exist, it is truncated. The file names /dev/stdout and /dev/stderr are handled specially; they refer to 474 the standard output and standard error output, respectively. The output file is always created, even if the predicate is never matched. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual characters in 475 filenames are handled. 476 477 -fprint0 file 478 True; like -print0 but write to file like -fprint. The output file is always created, even if the predicate is never matched. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual characters in filenames 479 are handled. 480 481 -fprintf file format 482 True; like -printf but write to file like -fprint. The output file is always created, even if the predicate is never matched. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual characters in filenames 483 are handled. 484 485 -ls True; list current file in ls -dils format on standard output. The block counts are of 1 KB blocks, unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, in which case 512-byte blocks are used. See the UNUSUAL FILE‐ 486 NAMES section for information about how unusual characters in filenames are handled. 487 488 -ok command ; 489 Like -exec but ask the user first. If the user agrees, run the command. Otherwise just return false. If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from /dev/null. This action may not be specified together 490 with the -files0-from option. 491 492 The response to the prompt is matched against a pair of regular expressions to determine if it is an affirmative or negative response. This regular expression is obtained from the system if the POSIXLY_CORRECT environ‐ 493 ment variable is set, or otherwise from find's message translations. If the system has no suitable definition, find's own definition will be used. In either case, the interpretation of the regular expression itself 494 will be affected by the environment variables LC_CTYPE (character classes) and LC_COLLATE (character ranges and equivalence classes). 495 496 -okdir command ; 497 Like -execdir but ask the user first in the same way as for -ok. If the user does not agree, just return false. If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from /dev/null. This action may not be specified 498 together with the -files0-from option. 499 500 -print True; print the full file name on the standard output, followed by a newline. If you are piping the output of find into another program and there is the faintest possibility that the files which you are searching for 501 might contain a newline, then you should seriously consider using the -print0 option instead of -print. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual characters in filenames are handled. 502 503 -print0 504 True; print the full file name on the standard output, followed by a null character (instead of the newline character that -print uses). This allows file names that contain newlines or other types of white space to be 505 correctly interpreted by programs that process the find output. This option corresponds to the -0 option of xargs. 506 507 -printf format 508 True; print format on the standard output, interpreting ‘\' escapes and ‘%' directives. Field widths and precisions can be specified as with the printf(3) C function. Please note that many of the fields are printed as 509 %s rather than %d, and this may mean that flags don't work as you might expect. This also means that the ‘-' flag does work (it forces fields to be left-aligned). Unlike -print, -printf does not add a newline at the 510 end of the string. The escapes and directives are: 511 512 \a Alarm bell. 513 514 \b Backspace. 515 516 \c Stop printing from this format immediately and flush the output. 517 518 \f Form feed. 519 520 \n Newline. 521 522 \r Carriage return. 523 524 \t Horizontal tab. 525 526 \v Vertical tab. 527 528 \0 ASCII NUL. 529 530 \\ A literal backslash (‘\'). 531 532 \NNN The character whose ASCII code is NNN (octal). 533 534 A ‘\' character followed by any other character is treated as an ordinary character, so they both are printed. 535 536 %% A literal percent sign. 537 538 %a File's last access time in the format returned by the C ctime(3) function. 539 540 %Ak File's last access time in the format specified by k, which is either ‘@' or a directive for the C strftime(3) function. The following shows an incomplete list of possible values for k. Please refer to the doc‐ 541 umentation of strftime(3) for the full list. Some of the conversion specification characters might not be available on all systems, due to differences in the implementation of the strftime(3) library function. 542 543 @ seconds since Jan. 1, 1970, 00:00 GMT, with fractional part. 544 545 Time fields: 546 547 H hour (00..23) 548 549 I hour (01..12) 550 551 k hour ( 0..23) 552 553 l hour ( 1..12) 554 555 M minute (00..59) 556 557 p locale's AM or PM 558 559 r time, 12-hour (hh:mm:ss [AP]M) 560 561 S Second (00.00 .. 61.00). There is a fractional part. 562 563 T time, 24-hour (hh:mm:ss.xxxxxxxxxx) 564 565 + Date and time, separated by ‘+', for example ‘2004-04-28+22:22:05.0'. This is a GNU extension. The time is given in the current timezone (which may be affected by setting the TZ environment variable). 566 The seconds field includes a fractional part. 567 568 X locale's time representation (H:M:S). The seconds field includes a fractional part. 569 570 Z time zone (e.g., EDT), or nothing if no time zone is determinable 571 572 Date fields: 573 574 a locale's abbreviated weekday name (Sun..Sat) 575 576 A locale's full weekday name, variable length (Sunday..Saturday) 577 578 b locale's abbreviated month name (Jan..Dec) 579 580 B locale's full month name, variable length (January..December) 581 582 c locale's date and time (Sat Nov 04 12:02:33 EST 1989). The format is the same as for ctime(3) and so to preserve compatibility with that format, there is no fractional part in the seconds field. 583 584 d day of month (01..31) 585 586 D date (mm/dd/yy) 587 588 F date (yyyy-mm-dd) 589 590 h same as b 591 592 j day of year (001..366) 593 594 m month (01..12) 595 596 U week number of year with Sunday as first day of week (00..53) 597 598 w day of week (0..6) 599 600 W week number of year with Monday as first day of week (00..53) 601 602 x locale's date representation (mm/dd/yy) 603 604 y last two digits of year (00..99) 605 606 Y year (1970...) 607 608 %b The amount of disk space used for this file in 512-byte blocks. Since disk space is allocated in multiples of the filesystem block size this is usually greater than %s/512, but it can also be smaller if the file 609 is a sparse file. 610 611 %Bk File's birth time, i.e., its creation time, in the format specified by k, which is the same as for %A. This directive produces an empty string if the underlying operating system or filesystem does not support 612 birth times. 613 614 %c File's last status change time in the format returned by the C ctime(3) function. 615 616 %Ck File's last status change time in the format specified by k, which is the same as for %A. 617 618 %d File's depth in the directory tree; 0 means the file is a starting-point. 619 620 %D The device number on which the file exists (the st_dev field of struct stat), in decimal. 621 622 %f Print the basename; the file's name with any leading directories removed (only the last element). For /, the result is ‘/'. See the EXAMPLES section for an example. 623 624 %F Type of the filesystem the file is on; this value can be used for -fstype. 625 626 %g File's group name, or numeric group ID if the group has no name. 627 628 %G File's numeric group ID. 629 630 %h Dirname; the Leading directories of the file's name (all but the last element). If the file name contains no slashes (since it is in the current directory) the %h specifier expands to ‘.'. For files which are 631 themselves directories and contain a slash (including /), %h expands to the empty string. See the EXAMPLES section for an example. 632 633 %H Starting-point under which file was found. 634 635 %i File's inode number (in decimal). 636 637 %k The amount of disk space used for this file in 1 KB blocks. Since disk space is allocated in multiples of the filesystem block size this is usually greater than %s/1024, but it can also be smaller if the file is 638 a sparse file. 639 640 %l Object of symbolic link (empty string if file is not a symbolic link). 641 642 %m File's permission bits (in octal). This option uses the ‘traditional' numbers which most Unix implementations use, but if your particular implementation uses an unusual ordering of octal permissions bits, you 643 will see a difference between the actual value of the file's mode and the output of %m. Normally you will want to have a leading zero on this number, and to do this, you should use the # flag (as in, for exam‐ 644 ple, ‘%#m'). 645 646 %M File's permissions (in symbolic form, as for ls). This directive is supported in findutils 4.2.5 and later. 647 648 %n Number of hard links to file. 649 650 %p File's name. 651 652 %P File's name with the name of the starting-point under which it was found removed. 653 654 %s File's size in bytes. 655 656 %S File's sparseness. This is calculated as (BLOCKSIZE*st_blocks / st_size). The exact value you will get for an ordinary file of a certain length is system-dependent. However, normally sparse files will have 657 values less than 1.0, and files which use indirect blocks may have a value which is greater than 1.0. In general the number of blocks used by a file is file system dependent. The value used for BLOCKSIZE is 658 system-dependent, but is usually 512 bytes. If the file size is zero, the value printed is undefined. On systems which lack support for st_blocks, a file's sparseness is assumed to be 1.0. 659 660 %t File's last modification time in the format returned by the C ctime(3) function. 661 662 %Tk File's last modification time in the format specified by k, which is the same as for %A. 663 664 %u File's user name, or numeric user ID if the user has no name. 665 666 %U File's numeric user ID. 667 668 %y File's type (like in ls -l), U=unknown type (shouldn't happen) 669 670 %Y File's type (like %y), plus follow symbolic links: ‘L'=loop, ‘N'=nonexistent, ‘?' for any other error when determining the type of the target of a symbolic link. 671 672 %Z (SELinux only) file's security context. 673 674 %{ %[ %( 675 Reserved for future use. 676 677 A ‘%' character followed by any other character is discarded, but the other character is printed (don't rely on this, as further format characters may be introduced). A ‘%' at the end of the format argument causes un‐ 678 defined behaviour since there is no following character. In some locales, it may hide your door keys, while in others it may remove the final page from the novel you are reading. 679 680 The %m and %d directives support the #, 0 and + flags, but the other directives do not, even if they print numbers. Numeric directives that do not support these flags include G, U, b, D, k and n. The ‘-' format flag 681 is supported and changes the alignment of a field from right-justified (which is the default) to left-justified. 682 683 See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual characters in filenames are handled. 684 685 -prune True; if the file is a directory, do not descend into it. If -depth is given, then -prune has no effect. Because -delete implies -depth, you cannot usefully use -prune and -delete together. For example, to skip the 686 directory src/emacs and all files and directories under it, and print the names of the other files found, do something like this: 687 find . -path ./src/emacs -prune -o -print 688 689 -quit Exit immediately (with return value zero if no errors have occurred). This is different to -prune because -prune only applies to the contents of pruned directories, while -quit simply makes find stop immediately. No 690 child processes will be left running. Any command lines which have been built by -exec ... + or -execdir ... + are invoked before the program is exited. After -quit is executed, no more files specified on the command 691 line will be processed. For example, ‘find /tmp/foo /tmp/bar -print -quit‘ will print only ‘/tmp/foo‘. 692 One common use of -quit is to stop searching the file system once we have found what we want. For example, if we want to find just a single file we can do this: 693 find / -name needle -print -quit 694 695 OPERATORS 696 Listed in order of decreasing precedence: 697 698 ( expr ) 699 Force precedence. Since parentheses are special to the shell, you will normally need to quote them. Many of the examples in this manual page use backslashes for this purpose: ‘\(...\)' instead of ‘(...)'. 700 701 ! expr True if expr is false. This character will also usually need protection from interpretation by the shell. 702 703 -not expr 704 Same as ! expr, but not POSIX compliant. 705 706 expr1 expr2 707 Two expressions in a row are taken to be joined with an implied -a; expr2 is not evaluated if expr1 is false. 708 709 expr1 -a expr2 710 Same as expr1 expr2. 711 712 expr1 -and expr2 713 Same as expr1 expr2, but not POSIX compliant. 714 715 expr1 -o expr2 716 Or; expr2 is not evaluated if expr1 is true. 717 718 expr1 -or expr2 719 Same as expr1 -o expr2, but not POSIX compliant. 720 721 expr1 , expr2 722 List; both expr1 and expr2 are always evaluated. The value of expr1 is discarded; the value of the list is the value of expr2. The comma operator can be useful for searching for several different types of thing, but 723 traversing the filesystem hierarchy only once. The -fprintf action can be used to list the various matched items into several different output files. 724 725 Please note that -a when specified implicitly (for example by two tests appearing without an explicit operator between them) or explicitly has higher precedence than -o. This means that find . -name afile -o -name bfile 726 -print will never print afile. 727 728 UNUSUAL FILENAMES 729 Many of the actions of find result in the printing of data which is under the control of other users. This includes file names, sizes, modification times and so forth. File names are a potential problem since they can con‐ 730 tain any character except ‘\0' and ‘/'. Unusual characters in file names can do unexpected and often undesirable things to your terminal (for example, changing the settings of your function keys on some terminals). Unusual 731 characters are handled differently by various actions, as described below. 732 733 -print0, -fprint0 734 Always print the exact filename, unchanged, even if the output is going to a terminal. 735 736 -ls, -fls 737 Unusual characters are always escaped. White space, backslash, and double quote characters are printed using C-style escaping (for example ‘\f', ‘\"'). Other unusual characters are printed using an octal escape. 738 Other printable characters (for -ls and -fls these are the characters between octal 041 and 0176) are printed as-is. 739 740 -printf, -fprintf 741 If the output is not going to a terminal, it is printed as-is. Otherwise, the result depends on which directive is in use. The directives %D, %F, %g, %G, %H, %Y, and %y expand to values which are not under control of 742 files' owners, and so are printed as-is. The directives %a, %b, %c, %d, %i, %k, %m, %M, %n, %s, %t, %u and %U have values which are under the control of files' owners but which cannot be used to send arbitrary data to 743 the terminal, and so these are printed as-is. The directives %f, %h, %l, %p and %P are quoted. This quoting is performed in the same way as for GNU ls. This is not the same quoting mechanism as the one used for -ls 744 and -fls. If you are able to decide what format to use for the output of find then it is normally better to use ‘\0' as a terminator than to use newline, as file names can contain white space and newline characters. 745 The setting of the LC_CTYPE environment variable is used to determine which characters need to be quoted. 746 747 -print, -fprint 748 Quoting is handled in the same way as for -printf and -fprintf. If you are using find in a script or in a situation where the matched files might have arbitrary names, you should consider using -print0 instead of 749 -print. 750 751 The -ok and -okdir actions print the current filename as-is. This may change in a future release. 752 753 STANDARDS CONFORMANCE 754 For closest compliance to the POSIX standard, you should set the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable. The following options are specified in the POSIX standard (IEEE Std 1003.1-2008, 2016 Edition): 755 756 -H This option is supported. 757 758 -L This option is supported. 759 760 -name This option is supported, but POSIX conformance depends on the POSIX conformance of the system's fnmatch(3) library function. As of findutils-4.2.2, shell metacharacters (‘*', ‘?' or ‘[]' for example) match a leading 761 ‘.', because IEEE PASC interpretation 126 requires this. This is a change from previous versions of findutils. 762 763 -type Supported. POSIX specifies ‘b', ‘c', ‘d', ‘l', ‘p', ‘f' and ‘s'. GNU find also supports ‘D', representing a Door, where the OS provides these. Furthermore, GNU find allows multiple types to be specified at once in a 764 comma-separated list. 765 766 -ok Supported. Interpretation of the response is according to the ‘yes' and ‘no' patterns selected by setting the LC_MESSAGES environment variable. When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, these patterns are 767 taken system's definition of a positive (yes) or negative (no) response. See the system's documentation for nl_langinfo(3), in particular YESEXPR and NOEXPR. When POSIXLY_CORRECT is not set, the patterns are instead 768 taken from find's own message catalogue. 769 770 -newer Supported. If the file specified is a symbolic link, it is always dereferenced. This is a change from previous behaviour, which used to take the relevant time from the symbolic link; see the HISTORY section below. 771 772 -perm Supported. If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is not set, some mode arguments (for example +a+x) which are not valid in POSIX are supported for backward-compatibility. 773 774 Other primaries 775 The primaries -atime, -ctime, -depth, -exec, -group, -links, -mtime, -nogroup, -nouser, -ok, -path, -print, -prune, -size, -user and -xdev are all supported. 776 777 The POSIX standard specifies parentheses ‘(', ‘)', negation ‘!' and the logical AND/OR operators -a and -o. 778 779 All other options, predicates, expressions and so forth are extensions beyond the POSIX standard. Many of these extensions are not unique to GNU find, however. 780 781 The POSIX standard requires that find detects loops: 782 783 The find utility shall detect infinite loops; that is, entering a previously visited directory that is an ancestor of the last file encountered. When it detects an infinite loop, find shall write a diagnostic message 784 to standard error and shall either recover its position in the hierarchy or terminate. 785 786 GNU find complies with these requirements. The link count of directories which contain entries which are hard links to an ancestor will often be lower than they otherwise should be. This can mean that GNU find will sometimes 787 optimise away the visiting of a subdirectory which is actually a link to an ancestor. Since find does not actually enter such a subdirectory, it is allowed to avoid emitting a diagnostic message. Although this behaviour may 788 be somewhat confusing, it is unlikely that anybody actually depends on this behaviour. If the leaf optimisation has been turned off with -noleaf, the directory entry will always be examined and the diagnostic message will be 789 issued where it is appropriate. Symbolic links cannot be used to create filesystem cycles as such, but if the -L option or the -follow option is in use, a diagnostic message is issued when find encounters a loop of symbolic 790 links. As with loops containing hard links, the leaf optimisation will often mean that find knows that it doesn't need to call stat() or chdir() on the symbolic link, so this diagnostic is frequently not necessary. 791 792 The -d option is supported for compatibility with various BSD systems, but you should use the POSIX-compliant option -depth instead. 793 794 The POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable does not affect the behaviour of the -regex or -iregex tests because those tests aren't specified in the POSIX standard. 795 796 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 797 LANG Provides a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. 798 799 LC_ALL If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables. 800 801 LC_COLLATE 802 The POSIX standard specifies that this variable affects the pattern matching to be used for the -name option. GNU find uses the fnmatch(3) library function, and so support for LC_COLLATE depends on the system library. 803 This variable also affects the interpretation of the response to -ok; while the LC_MESSAGES variable selects the actual pattern used to interpret the response to -ok, the interpretation of any bracket expressions in the 804 pattern will be affected by LC_COLLATE. 805 806 LC_CTYPE 807 This variable affects the treatment of character classes used in regular expressions and also with the -name test, if the system's fnmatch(3) library function supports this. This variable also affects the interpreta‐ 808 tion of any character classes in the regular expressions used to interpret the response to the prompt issued by -ok. The LC_CTYPE environment variable will also affect which characters are considered to be unprintable 809 when filenames are printed; see the section UNUSUAL FILENAMES. 810 811 LC_MESSAGES 812 Determines the locale to be used for internationalised messages. If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, this also determines the interpretation of the response to the prompt made by the -ok action. 813 814 NLSPATH 815 Determines the location of the internationalisation message catalogues. 816 817 PATH Affects the directories which are searched to find the executables invoked by -exec, -execdir, -ok and -okdir. 818 819 POSIXLY_CORRECT 820 Determines the block size used by -ls and -fls. If POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, blocks are units of 512 bytes. Otherwise they are units of 1024 bytes. 821 822 Setting this variable also turns off warning messages (that is, implies -nowarn) by default, because POSIX requires that apart from the output for -ok, all messages printed on stderr are diagnostics and must result in a 823 non-zero exit status. 824 825 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is not set, -perm +zzz is treated just like -perm /zzz if +zzz is not a valid symbolic mode. When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, such constructs are treated as an error. 826 827 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, the response to the prompt made by the -ok action is interpreted according to the system's message catalogue, as opposed to according to find's own message translations. 828 829 TZ Affects the time zone used for some of the time-related format directives of -printf and -fprintf. 830 831 EXAMPLES 832 Simple ‘find|xargs‘ approach 833 • Find files named core in or below the directory /tmp and delete them. 834 835 $ find /tmp -name core -type f -print | xargs /bin/rm -f 836 837 Note that this will work incorrectly if there are any filenames containing newlines, single or double quotes, or spaces. 838 839 Safer ‘find -print0 | xargs -0‘ approach 840 • Find files named core in or below the directory /tmp and delete them, processing filenames in such a way that file or directory names containing single or double quotes, spaces or newlines are correctly handled. 841 842 $ find /tmp -name core -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f 843 844 The -name test comes before the -type test in order to avoid having to call stat(2) on every file. 845 846 Note that there is still a race between the time find traverses the hierarchy printing the matching filenames, and the time the process executed by xargs works with that file. 847 848 Processing arbitrary starting points 849 • Given that another program proggy pre-filters and creates a huge NUL-separated list of files, process those as starting points, and find all regular, empty files among them: 850 851 $ proggy | find -files0-from - -maxdepth 0 -type f -empty 852 853 The use of ‘-files0-from -‘ means to read the names of the starting points from standard input, i.e., from the pipe; and -maxdepth 0 ensures that only explicitly those entries are examined without recursing into direc‐ 854 tories (in the case one of the starting points is one). 855 856 Executing a command for each file 857 • Run file on every file in or below the current directory. 858 859 $ find . -type f -exec file '{}' \; 860 861 Notice that the braces are enclosed in single quote marks to protect them from interpretation as shell script punctuation. The semicolon is similarly protected by the use of a backslash, though single quotes could have 862 been used in that case also. 863 864 In many cases, one might prefer the ‘-exec ... +‘ or better the ‘-execdir ... +‘ syntax for performance and security reasons. 865 866 Traversing the filesystem just once - for 2 different actions 867 • Traverse the filesystem just once, listing set-user-ID files and directories into /root/suid.txt and large files into /root/big.txt. 868 869 $ find / \ 870 \( -perm -4000 -fprintf /root/suid.txt '%#m %u %p\n' \) , \ 871 \( -size +100M -fprintf /root/big.txt '%-10s %p\n' \) 872 873 This example uses the line-continuation character '\' on the first two lines to instruct the shell to continue reading the command on the next line. 874 875 Searching files by age 876 • Search for files in your home directory which have been modified in the last twenty-four hours. 877 878 $ find $HOME -mtime 0 879 880 This command works this way because the time since each file was last modified is divided by 24 hours and any remainder is discarded. That means that to match -mtime 0, a file will have to have a modification in the 881 past which is less than 24 hours ago. 882 883 Searching files by permissions 884 • Search for files which are executable but not readable. 885 886 $ find /sbin /usr/sbin -executable \! -readable -print 887 888 • Search for files which have read and write permission for their owner, and group, but which other users can read but not write to. 889 890 $ find . -perm 664 891 892 Files which meet these criteria but have other permissions bits set (for example if someone can execute the file) will not be matched. 893 894 • Search for files which have read and write permission for their owner and group, and which other users can read, without regard to the presence of any extra permission bits (for example the executable bit). 895 896 $ find . -perm -664 897 898 This will match a file which has mode 0777, for example. 899 900 • Search for files which are writable by somebody (their owner, or their group, or anybody else). 901 902 $ find . -perm /222 903 904 • Search for files which are writable by either their owner or their group. 905 906 $ find . -perm /220 907 $ find . -perm /u+w,g+w 908 $ find . -perm /u=w,g=w 909 910 All three of these commands do the same thing, but the first one uses the octal representation of the file mode, and the other two use the symbolic form. The files don't have to be writable by both the owner and group 911 to be matched; either will do. 912 913 • Search for files which are writable by both their owner and their group. 914 915 $ find . -perm -220 916 $ find . -perm -g+w,u+w 917 918 Both these commands do the same thing. 919 920 • A more elaborate search on permissions. 921 922 $ find . -perm -444 -perm /222 \! -perm /111 923 $ find . -perm -a+r -perm /a+w \! -perm /a+x 924 925 These two commands both search for files that are readable for everybody (-perm -444 or -perm -a+r), have at least one write bit set (-perm /222 or -perm /a+w) but are not executable for anybody (! -perm /111 or ! -perm 926 /a+x respectively). 927 928 Pruning - omitting files and subdirectories 929 • Copy the contents of /source-dir to /dest-dir, but omit files and directories named .snapshot (and anything in them). It also omits files or directories whose name ends in ‘~', but not their contents. 930 931 $ cd /source-dir 932 $ find . -name .snapshot -prune -o \( \! -name '*˜' -print0 \) \ 933 | cpio -pmd0 /dest-dir 934 935 The construct -prune -o \( ... -print0 \) is quite common. The idea here is that the expression before -prune matches things which are to be pruned. However, the -prune action itself returns true, so the following -o 936 ensures that the right hand side is evaluated only for those directories which didn't get pruned (the contents of the pruned directories are not even visited, so their contents are irrelevant). The expression on the 937 right hand side of the -o is in parentheses only for clarity. It emphasises that the -print0 action takes place only for things that didn't have -prune applied to them. Because the default ‘and' condition between 938 tests binds more tightly than -o, this is the default anyway, but the parentheses help to show what is going on. 939 940 • Given the following directory of projects and their associated SCM administrative directories, perform an efficient search for the projects' roots: 941 942 $ find repo/ \ 943 \( -exec test -d '{}/.svn' \; \ 944 -or -exec test -d '{}/.git' \; \ 945 -or -exec test -d '{}/CVS' \; \ 946 \) -print -prune 947 948 Sample output: 949 950 repo/project1/CVS 951 repo/gnu/project2/.svn 952 repo/gnu/project3/.svn 953 repo/gnu/project3/src/.svn 954 repo/project4/.git 955 956 In this example, -prune prevents unnecessary descent into directories that have already been discovered (for example we do not search project3/src because we already found project3/.svn), but ensures sibling directories 957 (project2 and project3) are found. 958 959 Other useful examples 960 • Search for several file types. 961 962 $ find /tmp -type f,d,l 963 964 Search for files, directories, and symbolic links in the directory /tmp passing these types as a comma-separated list (GNU extension), which is otherwise equivalent to the longer, yet more portable: 965 966 $ find /tmp \( -type f -o -type d -o -type l \) 967 968 • Search for files with the particular name needle and stop immediately when we find the first one. 969 970 $ find / -name needle -print -quit 971 972 • Demonstrate the interpretation of the %f and %h format directives of the -printf action for some corner-cases. Here is an example including some output. 973 974 $ find . .. / /tmp /tmp/TRACE compile compile/64/tests/find -maxdepth 0 -printf '[%h][%f]\n' 975 [.][.] 976 [.][..] 977 [][/] 978 [][tmp] 979 [/tmp][TRACE] 980 [.][compile] 981 [compile/64/tests][find] 982 983 EXIT STATUS 984 find exits with status 0 if all files are processed successfully, greater than 0 if errors occur. This is deliberately a very broad description, but if the return value is non-zero, you should not rely on the correctness of 985 the results of find. 986 987 When some error occurs, find may stop immediately, without completing all the actions specified. For example, some starting points may not have been examined or some pending program invocations for -exec ... {} + or -ex‐ 988 ecdir ... {} + may not have been performed. 989 990 HISTORY 991 As of findutils-4.2.2, shell metacharacters (‘*', ‘?' or ‘[]' for example) used in filename patterns match a leading ‘.', because IEEE POSIX interpretation 126 requires this. 992 993 As of findutils-4.3.3, -perm /000 now matches all files instead of none. 994 995 Nanosecond-resolution timestamps were implemented in findutils-4.3.3. 996 997 As of findutils-4.3.11, the -delete action sets find's exit status to a nonzero value when it fails. However, find will not exit immediately. Previously, find's exit status was unaffected by the failure of -delete. 998 Feature Added in Also occurs in 999 -files0-from 4.9.0 1000 -newerXY 4.3.3 BSD 1001 -D 4.3.1 1002 -O 4.3.1 1003 -readable 4.3.0 1004 -writable 4.3.0 1005 -executable 4.3.0 1006 -regextype 4.2.24 1007 -exec ... + 4.2.12 POSIX 1008 -execdir 4.2.12 BSD 1009 -okdir 4.2.12 1010 -samefile 4.2.11 1011 -H 4.2.5 POSIX 1012 -L 4.2.5 POSIX 1013 -P 4.2.5 BSD 1014 -delete 4.2.3 1015 -quit 4.2.3 1016 -d 4.2.3 BSD 1017 -wholename 4.2.0 1018 -iwholename 4.2.0 1019 -ignore_readdir_race 4.2.0 1020 -fls 4.0 1021 -ilname 3.8 1022 -iname 3.8 1023 -ipath 3.8 1024 -iregex 3.8 1025 1026 The syntax -perm +MODE was removed in findutils-4.5.12, in favour of -perm /MODE. The +MODE syntax had been deprecated since findutils-4.2.21 which was released in 2005. 1027 1028 NON-BUGS 1029 Operator precedence surprises 1030 The command find . -name afile -o -name bfile -print will never print afile because this is actually equivalent to find . -name afile -o \( -name bfile -a -print \). Remember that the precedence of -a is higher than that of 1031 -o and when there is no operator specified between tests, -a is assumed. 1032 1033 “paths must precede expression” error message 1034 $ find . -name *.c -print 1035 find: paths must precede expression 1036 find: possible unquoted pattern after predicate ‘-name'? 1037 1038 This happens when the shell could expand the pattern *.c to more than one file name existing in the current directory, and passing the resulting file names in the command line to find like this: 1039 find . -name frcode.c locate.c word_io.c -print 1040 That command is of course not going to work, because the -name predicate allows exactly only one pattern as argument. Instead of doing things this way, you should enclose the pattern in quotes or escape the wildcard, thus al‐ 1041 lowing find to use the pattern with the wildcard during the search for file name matching instead of file names expanded by the parent shell: 1042 $ find . -name '*.c' -print 1043 $ find . -name \*.c -print 1044 1045 BUGS 1046 There are security problems inherent in the behaviour that the POSIX standard specifies for find, which therefore cannot be fixed. For example, the -exec action is inherently insecure, and -execdir should be used instead. 1047 1048 The environment variable LC_COLLATE has no effect on the -ok action. 1049 1050 REPORTING BUGS 1051 GNU findutils online help: <https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/#get-help> 1052 Report any translation bugs to <https://translationproject.org/team/> 1053 1054 Report any other issue via the form at the GNU Savannah bug tracker: 1055 <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils> 1056 General topics about the GNU findutils package are discussed at the bug-findutils mailing list: 1057 <https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils> 1058 1059 COPYRIGHT 1060 Copyright © 1990-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. 1061 This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. 1062 1063 SEE ALSO 1064 chmod(1), locate(1), ls(1), updatedb(1), xargs(1), lstat(2), stat(2), ctime(3) fnmatch(3), printf(3), strftime(3), locatedb(5), regex(7) 1065 1066 Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/find> 1067 or available locally via: info find 1068 1069 FIND(1)