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How can I find a file on my hard drive created by root that has write permissions?

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You need to be more specific. Where are you looking for the file? Do you know any specifics about the file (name, type, etc)? – kevlar1818 Jul 28 '11 at 21:16
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use the find command and the -perm switch. I don't get the title of your question... – Fredrik Pihl Jul 28 '11 at 21:16
yes ... may you give me a find command for it ... Tnx – Ejder Jul 28 '11 at 21:18
have you tried the answer below from @Jaidev-Sridhar ? – Fredrik Pihl Jul 28 '11 at 21:24
Sorry, but did you even bother to read man find? All the answers point you to that and that is for a reason. – rozcietrzewiacz Jul 29 '11 at 6:22

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 28 '11 at 21:32

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

To look for a file matching multiple conditions with find, simply list each condition in turn. For example, to look for a file owned by root (-user root) and writable by its owner (-perm -u+w) on the root filesystem (-xdev, meaning not to recurse underneath mount points such as /proc and /sys) and called hello:

find / -xdev -user root -perm -u+w -name hello

If you're looking for world-writable files, replace -u+w by -a+w. (The - before the permissions means that the file must have at least these permissions; without it find would look for a file having exactly the specified permissions.) With GNU find, you can also look for a file that is writable by the user running find: replace -perm -u+w by -writable.

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up vote 0 down vote 
find / -uid 0 -perm u+w,g+w,o+w

If you want writable by others, just have o+w.

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I created ex.pl previously and chmodded it to 777, and then executed your command, but the command didn't find ex.pl. What's wrong? – Ejder Jul 28 '11 at 21:34
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You can condense u+w,g+w,o+w into a+w. But you need to tell find to look for a file having at least these permissions: -perm -a+w. – Gilles Jul 28 '11 at 22:18
@Ejder did you create the file as user root? – skjaidev Jul 28 '11 at 22:36

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