Make a test directory with one file:
> cd ~/Desktop > mkdir x > touch x/y.txt > cd |
Basic usage for find is: find dirname -name filename
> find . -name y.txt ./Desktop/x/y.txt > |
Don't forget the -name. Without it, find thinks file_name is just another place to search, since find can take multiple directories to search. "." is, of course, the current directory (I'm in my home directory "~"), while "/" would be the root of the file system.
Another use would be to count the number of files with wc:
> find . | wc -l 158479 > |
Of course, find can use wildcards.
> find ~/Desktop -name \*.txt /Users/telliott/Desktop/notes.txt /Users/telliott/Desktop/todo.txt /Users/telliott/Desktop/x/y.txt |
Notice the backslash to escape: \*
[ UPDATE: Can also be done with quotes "*.txt" ]
The above will also find hidden files. Other useful options for find include:
-type
-mtime
-mmin
For example, find all recently changed files:
> find ~/Desktop -mmin -30 /Users/telliott/Desktop /Users/telliott/Desktop/.DS_Store /Users/telliott/Desktop/.y.txt /Users/telliott/Desktop/x /Users/telliott/Desktop/x/y.txt |
Do this with ~ to find where TextEdit saves all its data about the current state!
With appropriate caution, you might pipe the results to xargs to run a command:
> cd Desktop/ > find . -name \*.txt ./.y.txt ./notes.txt ./Rob Pike.txt ./todo.txt ./x/y.txt > find . -name \*.txt | xargs /bin/ls -al ls: ./Rob: No such file or directory ls: Pike.txt: No such file or directory -rw-r--r-- 1 telliott staff 0 Apr 26 06:23 ./.y.txt -rw-r--r--@ 1 telliott staff 29 Apr 23 15:54 ./notes.txt -rw-r--r--@ 1 telliott staff 815 Apr 24 17:19 ./todo.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 telliott staff 0 Apr 26 06:00 ./x/y.txt |
Notice what happened to the filename that contains a space. I have to read more to know how to fix that.
If you're searching the system without read permission for directories you'll get error messages:
> find / -name foo find: /.DocumentRevisions-V100: Permission denied find: /.fseventsd: Permission denied find: /.Spotlight-V100: Permission denied find: /.Trashes: Permission denied |
They can be discarded like this:
> find / -name foo 2>/dev/null |
This redirects stderr (the "2") to /dev/null, which is a Unix black hole.
Another sort of listing is obtained with du-disk usage, piped to sort and then to tail.
> du -sc * | sort -n | tail 1590728 My Downloads 3188512 Software 3392024 Dropbox 8421800 VirtualBox VMs 8509928 Library 8937696 Teaching 19995376 Pictures-TE 43919360 Music 236592936 Movies 336685360 total |
Learn Unix in 10 minutes (quick reference)
A nice reference for find (and other stuff).
