Linux Find Command Examples

A mention of xargs might be worth slipping into this. A lot of the time it doesn't really matter whether you use that or -exec, but it's faster on large lists of files. And some commands (grep) act differently if there are multiple files specified as input.

Reading this article I realized I always put `find .`, i.e. explicitly specifying the current directory. I guess this is like saying `ls .` all the time, but oh well.

Sometimes I find that I need to chain a few actions for my search results that aren't possible with multiple -execs, so I employ the shell script loop:

  for js in `find . -name '*.js'`; do
    dir=`dirname $js`;
    cd $dir && make;
    java -jar jsmin.jar "$i";
  done;

Unfortunately if you've got spaces in your filenames, this will throw off /bin/sh and you have to specify delimiters or work around that.

Lastly, I've found with find that if you have a n-sized conditional where n > 1 and an -exec, you'll want to use escaped parentheses or otherwise the conditionals won't evaluate properly.

Edits: addressing formatting woes.

I always use it in the form:

  find . -iname '*.someextension' -exec ls -l {} \;

{} gets expanded to the matching file names. Of course ls -l is just an example of command to run against the file name.

sudo find / -size +1G -exec ls -lah '{}' \; | awk '{print $8" : "$5}' | tee files_over_1G.txt ### This I use alot.

man find expanded into article? nice.