More unix find tips

There are so many little things to remember in this command that I always have to lookup what switches to use. So here are a few ways of using find


To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in current directory and its sub-directories:

find . -mtime -1 -print

Flag -mtime -1 option tells find command to look for files modified in the last day (24 hours). Flag -print option will cause find command to print the files’ location. -print can be replaced with -ls if you want a directory-listing-type response.

To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in a particular specific directory and its sub-directories:

find /directory_path -mtime -1 -print

The command is basically the same with the earlier command, just that now you no need to cd (change directory) to the directory you want to search.

To find all files with regular file types only, and modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in current directory and its sub-directories:

find /directory_path -type f -mtime -1 -print

To find all files that are modified today only (since start of day only, i.e. 12 am), in current directory and its sub-directories:

touch -t `date +%m%d0000` /tmp/$$
find /tmefndr/oravl01 -type f -newer /tmp/$$
rm /tmp/$$

The first command can be modified to specify other date and time, so that the commands will return all files that have changed since that particular date and time.

Find a file or directory
# find . -name TEMP -print
or
# find . -name TEMP -exec echo {} \;

Find core files in this directory tree and remove them
# find . -name "core" -exec rm -f {} \;

Find junk directories and remove their contents recursively
# find . -name "junk" -exec rm -rf {} \;

Find a pattern in a file using the recursive grep (ignore case)
# find . -type f xargs grep -i MYPATTERN

Find files modified in the past 7 days
# find . -mtime -7 -type f

Find files owned by a particular user
# find . -user esofthub

Find all your writable directories and list them
# find . -perm -0777 -type d -lsor# find . -type d -perm 777 -print

Find all your writable files and list them
# find . -perm -0777 -type f -lsor#find . -type f -perm 777 -print

Find large file sizes and list them
# find . -type f -size +1000 -lsor
# find . -type f -size +1000 -print

Find how many directories are in a path (counts current directory)
# find . -type d -exec basename {} \; wc -l
53

Find how many files are in a path
# find . -type f -exec basename {} \; wc -l
120

Find all my pipe files and change their permissions to all writable
# find . -name "pipe*" -exec chmod 666 {} \;

Find files that were modified 7 days ago and archive
# find . -type f -mtime 7 xargs tar -cvf `date '+%d%m%Y'_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified more than 7 days ago and archive
# find . -type f -mtime +7 xargs tar -cvf `date '+%d%m%Y'_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified less than 7 days ago and archive
# find . -type f -mtime -7 xargs tar -cvf `date '+%d%m%Y'_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified more than 7 days ago but less than 14 days ago and archive
# find . -type f -mtime +7 -mtime -14 xargs tar -cvf `date '+%d%m%Y'_archive.tar`

Find files in two different directories having the "test" string and list them
# find esofthub esoft -name "*test*" -type f -ls

Find files in two different directories having the "test" string and list them
# find esofthub esoft -name "*test*" -type f -ls

Find files in two different directories having the "test" string and count them
# find esofthub esoft -name "*test*" -type f -ls wc -l
12

Find files and directories newer than CompareFile
# find . -newer CompareFile -print

Find files and directories older than CompareFile
# find . ! -newer CompareFile -print

Find files and directories but don't traverse a particular directory
# find . -name RAID -prune -o -print

Find all the files in the current directory
# find * -type f -print -o -type d -prune

Find an inode and remove
# find . -inum 968746 -exec rm -i {} \;

Avoid using "-exec {}", as it will fork a child process for every file, wasting memory and CPU in the process. Use `xargs`, which will celeverly fit as many arguments as possible to feed to a command, and split up the number of arguments into chunks as necessary:

find . -depth -name "blabla*" -type f xargs rm -f

Also, be as precise as possible when searching for files, as this directly affects how long one has to wait for results to come back. Most of the stuff actually only manipulates the parser rather than what is actually being searched for, but even there, we can squeeze some performance gains, for example:
- use "-depth" when looking for ordinary files and symollic links, as "-depth" will show them before directories
- use "-depth -type f" when looking for ordinary file(s), as this speeds up the parsing and the search significantly:

find . -depth -type f -print ...

- use "-mount" as the first argument when you know that you only want to search the current filesystem, and
- use "-local" when you want to filter out the results from remote filesystems.
Note that "-local" won't actually cause `find` not to search remote file systems -- this is one of the options that affects parsing of the results, not the actual process of locating files; for not spanning remote filesystems, use "-mount" instead:

find / -mount -depth \( -type f -o -type l \) -print ...


Read more about "More unix find tips"!

Copy and paste in Vi/Vim

This is a neat trick to know and saves a lot of time:

1. Go to the beginning of the line where you want to start copying.
2. Make sure you are in the command mode. (Hit ESC).
3. Type "ma". Which means, you are marking the spot with "a".
4. Go to the line till where you want to copy.
5. type y`a (yank to mark a). The ` is the back tick.
6. Now go to the place where you want to paste the text.
7. type p

Read more about "Copy and paste in Vi/Vim"!

Tips on unix find

Here is a nice tip on unix find..

$ find . cpio -pdumv /path/to/destination/dir

the files found by find are passed into cpio and it copies the files with the same permissions to the destination directory.
Read more about "Tips on unix find"!

linux tip on tar

If you untar a package, and it makes a mess of your directory because the packager didn't include the files in his tarball in a directory, you can use

% rm `tar ftz package.tar.gz`

to quickly get rid of those cluttering files.

% rm `tar ft package.tar`

does the same thing.


Read more about "linux tip on tar"!