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Name

find - find files

Synopsis

find path...expression

Availability

SUNWcsu

Description

The find command recursively descends the directory hierarchy for each path seeking files that match a Boolean expression written in the primaries given below.

find will be able to descend to arbitrary depths in a file hierarchy and will not fail due to path length limitations (unless a path operand specified by the application exceeds PATH_MAX requirements).

Operands

The following operands are supported:
path
a path name of a starting point in the directory hierarchy.

The first argument that starts with a -, or is a ! or a (, and all subsequent arguments will be interpreted as an expression made up of the following primaries and operators. In the descriptions, wherever n is used as a primary argument, it will be interpreted as a decimal integer optionally preceded by a plus (+) or minus (-) sign, as follows:

+n
more than n
n
exactly n
-n
less than n.

Expressions

Valid expressions are:

-atime n
True if the file was accessed n days ago. The access time of directories in path is changed by find itself.
-cpio device
Always true; write the current file on device in cpio format (5120-byte records).
-ctime n
True if the file’s status was changed n days ago.
-depth
Always true; causes descent of the directory hierarchy to be done so that all entries in a directory are acted on before the directory itself. This can be useful when find is used with cpio(1) to transfer files that are contained in directories without write permission.
-exec command
True if the executed command returns a zero value as exit status. The end of command must be punctuated by an escaped semicolon. A command argument {} is replaced by the current path name.
-follow
Always true; causes symbolic links to be followed. When following symbolic links, find keeps track of the directories visited so that it can detect infinite loops; for example, such a loop would occur if a symbolic link pointed to an ancestor. This expression should not be used with the -type l expression.
-fstype type
True if the filesystem to which the file belongs is of type type.
-group gname
True if the file belongs to the group gname. If gname is numeric and does not appear in the /etc/group file, it is taken as a group ID .
-inum n
True if the file has inode number n.
-links n
True if the file has n links.
-local
True if the file system type is not a remote file system type as defined in the /etc/dfs/fstypes file. nfs is used as the default remote filesystem type if the /etc/dfs/fstypes file is not present.
-ls
Always true; prints current path name together with its associated statistics. These include (respectively):

  • inode number
  • size in kilobytes (1024 bytes)
  • protection mode
  • number of hard links
  • user
  • group
  • size in bytes
  • modification time.
    • If the file is a special file the size field will instead
    contain the major and minor device numbers.
    If the file is a symbolic link the pathname of the
    linked-to file is printed preceded by ‘->’. The format is identical to that of ls -gilds (see ls(1) ).

    Note: Formatting is done internally, without executing the ls program.

    -mount
    Always true; restricts the search to the file system containing the directory specified. Does not list mount points to other file systems.
    -mtime n
    True if the file’s data was modified n days ago.
    -name pattern
    True if pattern matches the current file name. Normal shell file name generation characters (see sh(1) ) may be used. A backslash (\) is used as an escape character within the pattern. The pattern should be escaped or quoted when find is invoked from the shell.
    -ncpio device
    Always true; write the current file on device in cpio -c format (5120 byte records).
    -newer file
    True if the current file has been modified more recently than the argument file.
    -nogroup
    True if the file belongs to a group not in the /etc/group file.
    -nouser
    True if the file belongs to a user not in the /etc/passwd file.
    -ok command
    Like -exec except that the generated command line is printed with a question mark first, and is executed only if the user responds by typing y.
    -perm [-]mode
    The mode argument is used to represent file mode bits. It will be identical in format to the <symbolicmode> operand described in chmod(1) , and will be interpreted as follows. To start, a template will be assumed with all file mode bits cleared. An op symbol of:
    +
    will set the appropriate mode bits in the template;
    -
    will clear the appropriate bits;
    =
    will set the appropriate mode bits, without regard to the contents of process’ file mode creation mask.
    The
    op symbol of - cannot be the first character of mode; this avoids ambiguity with the optional leading hyphen. Since the initial mode is all bits off, there are not any symbolic modes that need to use - as the first character.
    If the hyphen is omitted, the primary will evaluate as
    true when the file permission bits exactly match the value of the resulting template.
    Otherwise, if
    mode is prefixed by a hyphen, the primary will evaluate as true if at least all the bits in the resulting template are set in the file permission bits.
    -perm [-]onum
    True if the file permission flags exactly match the octal number onum (see chmod(1) ). If onum is prefixed by a minus sign (-), only the bits that are set in onum are compared with the file permission flags, and the expression evaluates true if they match.
    -print
    Always true; causes the current path name to be printed.
    -prune
    Always yields true. Do not examine any directories or files in the directory structure below the pattern just matched. See the examples, below.
    -size n[c]
    True if the file is n blocks long (512 bytes per block). If n is followed by a c, the size is in bytes.
    -type c
    True if the type of the file is c, where c is b, c, d, l, p, or f for block special file, character special file, directory, symbolic link, fifo (named pipe), or plain file, respectively.
    -user uname
    True if the file belongs to the user uname. If uname is numeric and does not appear as a login name in the /etc/passwd file, it is taken as a user ID .
    -xdev
    Same as the -mount primary.

    Complex Expressions

    The primaries may be combined using the following operators (in order of decreasing precedence):

    1)    ( expression )

    True if the parenthesized expression is true (parentheses are special to the shell and must be escaped).
    2)    ! expression
    The negation of a primary (! is the unary not operator).
    3)    expression [-a] expression
    Concatenation of primaries (the and operation is implied by the juxtaposition of two primaries).
    4)    expression -o expression
    Alternation of primaries (-o is the or operator).

    Note: When you use find in conjunction with cpio, if you use the -L option with cpio then you must use the -follow expression with find and vice versa. Otherwise there will be undesirable results.

    If no expression is present, -print will be used as the expression. Otherwise, if the given expression does not contain any of the primaries -exec, -ok or -print, the given expression will be effectively replaced by:

    ( given_expression ) -print

    The -user, -group, and -newer primaries each will evaluate their respective arguments only once.

    Examples

    The following commands are equivalent: 


    example% find .
example% find . -print

    They both write out the entire directory hierarchy from the current directory.

    Remove all files in your home directory named a.out or *.o that have not been accessed for a week: 


    example% find $HOME \( -name a.out -o -name fm*.ofm \    -atime +7 \ -exec rm {} \;

    Recursively print all file names in the current directory and below, but skipping SCCS directories:

    example% find . -name SCCS -prune -o -print

    Recursively print all file names in the current directory and below, skipping the contents of SCCS directories, but printing out the SCCS directory name:

    example% find . -print -name SCCS -prune


    The following command is roughly equivalent to the -nt extension to test(1) : 


    example$ if [ -n "$(find file1 -prune -newer file2)" ]; then
    printf %s\\n "file1 is newer than file2"
fi

    The descriptions of -atime, -ctime, and -mtime use the terminology n ‘‘24-hour periods’’. For example, a file accessed at 23:59 will be selected by:

    example% find . -atime -1 -print

    at 00:01 the next day (less than 24 hours later, not more than one day ago); the midnight boundary between days has no effect on the 24-hour calculation.

    Environment

    See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of find: LC_COLLATE , LC_CTYPE , LC_MESSAGES , and NLSPATH .

    Exit Status

    The following exit values are returned:
    1. All path operands were traversed successfully.
    >0
    An error occurred.

    Files

    /etc/passwd
    password file
    /etc/group
    group file
    /etc/dfs/fstypes
    file that registers distributed file system packages

    See Also

    chmod(1) , ls(1) , sh(1) , test(1) , stat(2) , umask(2) , environ(5)

    Warnings

    The following options are obsolete and will not be supported in future releases:
    -cpio device
    Always true; write the current file on device in cpio format (5120-byte records).
    -ncpio device
    Always true; write the current file on device in cpio -c format (5120 byte records).

    Notes

    When using find to determine files modified within a range of time, one must use the ?time argument before the -print argument otherwise find will give all files.

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