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How do I remove “permission denied” printout statements from the find program?

When I run this command in Linux (SuSE):

find / -name ant

I get many error messages of the form:

find: `/etc/cups/ssl': Permission denied

Does find take an argument to skip showing these errors and only try files that I have permission to access?

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  • 7
    Since you ask about an argument to find, please consider: find / ! -readable -prune. This is like "prune those results not (!) readable". See: stackoverflow.com/questions/762348/…
    – appas
    Sep 16, 2016 at 11:21
  • Yeah! That's a proper way of doing it. And the reason I was searching, Redirecting STDERR should be something nobody should be allowed to ask :P
    – runlevel0
    Jun 22, 2022 at 12:04

1 Answer 1

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278

you can filter out messages to stderr. I prefer to redirect them to stdout like this.

 find / -name art  2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"

Explanation:

In short, all regular output goes to standard output (stdout). All error messages to standard error (stderr).

grep usually finds/prints the specified string, the -v inverts this, so it finds/prints every string that doesn't contain "Permission denied". All of your output from the find command, including error messages usually sent to stderr (file descriptor 2) go now to stdout(file descriptor 1) and then get filtered by the grep command.

This assumes you are using the bash/sh shell.

Under tcsh/csh you would use 

 find / -name art |& grep ....
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    or even just find / -name art 2>/dev/null
    – rush
    Jul 11, 2012 at 20:06
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    @rush That would filter out all error messages, not just the permission denied ones
    – Michael Mrozek
    Jul 11, 2012 at 23:08
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    Think about it, that's about all find CAN return as an error message. Disk full, disk read error, ... possible, but rare, and find isn't geared to handle those. You've got OTHER issues if those errors show up anyways. Find's own error result is even vague.. 0=good, !0=something happened. Not even really differentiating anything but pass/fail.
    – lornix
    Jul 13, 2012 at 3:24
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    I'm with @MichaelMrozek on this, I would rather see all possible error messages and then decide to filter them out instead of sending them to the bit-bucket unseen.
    – Levon
    Jul 13, 2012 at 3:35
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    When I use find 2>/dev/null I always want only the result set not any other error messages. When a result set returned with null I just run the "regular" find and figure out what the problem is.
    – Bálint Babics
    Jun 28, 2018 at 14:34

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