Command: find

The find command can be used to find files or folders matching a particular search pattern. It searches recursively.

Find all the files under the current tree that have the .js extension and print the relative path of each file matching:

find . -name '*.js'

Find directories under the current tree matching the name src:

find . -type d -name src

Use -type f to search only files, or -type l to only search symbolic links.

-name is case sensitive. Use -iname to perform a case-insensitive search.

You can search under multiple root trees:

find folder1 folder2 -name filename.txt

Find directories under the current tree matching the name “node_modules” or ‘public’:

find . -type d -name node_modules -or -name public

You can also exclude a path, using -not -path:

find . -type d -name '*.md' -not -path 'node_modules/*'

You can search files that have more than 100 characters (bytes) in them:

find . -type f -size +100c

Search files bigger than 100KB but smaller than 1MB:

find . -type f -size +100k -size -1M

Search files edited more than 3 days ago

find . -type f -mtime +3

Search files edited in the last 24 hours

find . -type f -mtime -1

You can delete all the files matching a search by adding the -delete option. This deletes all the files edited in the last 24 hours:

find . -type f -mtime -1 -delete

You can execute a command on each result of the search. In this example we run cat to print the file content:

find . -type f -exec cat {} \;

Notice the terminating \;. {} is filled with the file name at execution time.

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