cheatsheets/find.org

Find

Basic operation

find DIRECTORY EXPRESSION

As an example, here is the command that looks for a file with "captcha" somewhere in the name and the file name ends in "html".

find ./ -name '*captcha*html'

./math-captcha.html

You can also search using some basic regexp functionality. It uses bash's Shell Pattern Matching, which is

• *

match any 0 or more characters.

• ?

matches any 1 character

• [STRING]

This is a character class. It matches one character in the string. [aA] will match both "a" and "A". [a-zA-Z] matches all letters. If the character class starts with the "!" in "^" it will match 1 character that is not in the string. So [^0-9] will find any non-numbers.

find ~/programming/html/ -name '*[gG][nN][uU]*'

/home/joshua/programming/html/assign-copyright-to-GNU
/home/joshua/programming/html/my-wordpress-blog/images/GNUGuileLogo.png
/home/joshua/programming/html/GNUSites
/home/joshua/programming/html/my-portfolio-site/images/gnu.png

The above command was a bit cumbersome to write. Luckily, find lets you search case insensitively.

find ~/programming/html/ -iname '*gnu*'

/home/joshua/programming/html/assign-copyright-to-GNU
/home/joshua/programming/html/my-wordpress-blog/images/GNUGuileLogo.png
/home/joshua/programming/html/GNUSites
/home/joshua/programming/html/my-portfolio-site/images/gnu.png

Find also lets you combine options together.

find ~/programming/html/ -iname '*gnu*' -path '*images*'

/home/joshua/programming/html/my-wordpress-blog/images/GNUGuileLogo.png
/home/joshua/programming/html/my-portfolio-site/images/gnu.png

find ~/manuals/ -regex '.*manuals.*yas.*org'

/home/joshua/manuals/cheatsheets/yasnippet.org

You can also have find print like ls -l does.

find . -name '*arch.org' -ls

  8260652     60 -rw-r--r--   1  joshua   home        57385 Sep 20 12:01 ./arch.org

Find also supports running commands on the files that are found. For example here I am looking for a particular manual with the word keyboard in it.

find ~/manuals -name '*arch*' -execdir grep 'keyboard' '{}' ';'

* Change the virtual console keyboard layout
* Configuring Xorg Settings (keyboard layout)
** change the X keyboard layout & swap caps
        Identifier "libinput keyboard catchall"
* Change the virtual console keyboard layout
* Configuring Xorg Settings (keyboard layout)
** change the X keyboard layout & swap caps
        Identifier "libinput keyboard catchall"

Find expressions

Find has several groups of expressions.
• options
• tests
• actions
• operators