So I know that where command is a shell built in and as a result it performs faster and just finds executable files; but is there any other difference between the where and find commands?
2 Answers
They're very different beasts. where foo in tcsh (also in zsh) just tells you where foo is located in your $path (or more exactly the different foo commands the shells knows about by looking in the list of shell builtins and keywords, aliases and executable files found via a lookup of $PATH (mapped to the $path array)). find is a fairly powerful command for searching for files according to various criteria.
For instance,
find /usr/local -type f -mtime -30 -atime +7 \( -user bob -o -user karen \) -perm -001 -exec chmod -x {} \;
will find any files in /usr/local that are ordinary files (not directories or anything), have been modified in the last 30 days but not accessed in the past week, belong to either bob or karen, and are executable by other. It then chmods those files.
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Just a sidenote: there's also the locate(1) command, which is somewhat similar to find(1) - in that it looks up for any kind of files, not just the ones in your $PATH (in other words: not just for "executable commands") - but uses a periodically rebuilt index, so it's pretty fast.
answered Aug 1, 2017 at 15:29
whereisfindmanpage to find out all its features.whereorwhereisother then one of them is a builtinwherein the TENEX C and Z shells and that is what the questioner is specifically asking about.