Questions tagged [find]

For questions pertaining to find, a command-line utility to search for files in a directory hierarchy. Use this tag for questions about find itself or questions about issues arising from using the find command-line utility.

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0 votes
2 answers
979 views

How to copy files and directories without copying directory contents?

I have a find command that selects some directories and files to be copied to a different location (with --parents). What I'd like is for the directories that are output by the find command to be ...
2 votes
1 answer
2k views

Append path to filename

I have some pictures called test1.jpg in many subfolders. I want to essentially append the file's path to its name so there's no confusion. sample path: /tmp/xxx2016/folder123/folder2/folderxxx/...
1 vote
1 answer
99 views

Why does `find` sometimes find my file, sometimes not [duplicate]

Here is my directory tree (not showing all dirs, files, just the essential): a_root_dir/ (directory) a_root_dir/dynamo/local/run.sh a_root_dir/dynamo/local/run_local.sh Now when I do > cd ...
2 votes
5 answers
3k views

Find all [filename].mp4 and rename [filename].audio [duplicate]

So I have a script that adds 2 films together using the audio from the $1.audio file. What I would like to do is rename any file in the directory with: *.mp4 To: *.audio Keeping original file ...
4 votes
1 answer
1k views

Increment counter in find -exec

I have a script that runs a number of processes like this ./myproc1 --out=1.xml ./myotherproc --out=2.xml ./mythirdproc --out=3.xml ./myfourthproc --out=4.xml # ... some more files I want to ...
23 votes
5 answers
2k views

Why doesn't find . -delete delete current directory?

I would expect find . -delete to delete the current directory, but it doesn't. Why not?
0 votes
2 answers
63 views

How to use find with already written script?

I know how to find last modified files, but how do I use it with my already written script. In folder I have hundreds of files xyz_<yyyymm>, now I use $ find /home/directory/TEST/ -type f -mmin -...
2 votes
2 answers
4k views

Find files with extensions given in arguments using regex

Let's say a have a following command search /home/user proc .h .c .txt ... I am building a script with find command to get all files that start with given name and end with one of given extensions. ...
5 votes
2 answers
15k views

Replace string in multiple files using find and sed

So I've arrived at the conclusion that for recursively replacing all instances of a string in directory (only for .java extensions files) I need to use find . -type f -name "*.java" -exec sed -i 's/...
2 votes
2 answers
176 views

count lines matching string in each subdirectory and their subdirectories

In each subdirectory of my current directory, I would like to print the number of line-matches against a string for all files in the subdirectory and its subdirectories. For example, if I have cat /...
1 vote
1 answer
63 views

find matching file and change dirname path

I need to find a very efficient way of moving a file of matching -mtime from one directory tree to another directory, maintaining the same subdirectory path where it doesn't exist yet. eg. move /dirA/...
1 vote
1 answer
1k views

Find and remove directory from bash

#!/bin/bash # error handling function error_handler() { echo "Error occurred in script at line: ${1}" echo "Line exited with status: ${2}" } trap 'error_handler ${LINENO} $?' ERR set -o errexit ...
3 votes
4 answers
814 views

How to move a file recursively based on size and keep structure

I want to move files bigger than "300Mb" from one directory tree where each file is located in subfolders Example: I have a directory structure: dirA/ dirA/file1 dirA/x/ dirA/x/file2 dirA/y/ dirA/y/...
6 votes
1 answer
2k views

find -exec mv stops after first exec

While researching for this question: Find and move directories based on file type and date, I stumbled upon a problem of my own. First I created a bunch of directories with files in them: seq 10 | ...
-2 votes
1 answer
624 views

How do I print all words begining with a specific letter in a text

How do I print all words begining with a specific letter in a text? and all words of 4 characters? thanks
287 votes
2 answers
249k views

how can I recursively delete empty directories in my home directory? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How to remove all empty directories in a subtree? I create directories very often, scattered over my home directory, and I find it very hard to locate and delete them. I want ...
0 votes
3 answers
12k views

Search multiple directories and output file names

I have a list of 7 directories. Every day they get a file. I would run one command that would check all the directories at once which provides the output of the file names. Normally I run ls /...
87 votes
4 answers
308k views

Recursive grep vs find / -type f -exec grep {} \; Which is more efficient/faster?

Which is more efficient for finding which files in an entire filesystem contain a string: recursive grep or find with grep in an exec statement? I assume find would be more efficient because you can ...
1 vote
2 answers
2k views

find matching files in one directory and sub directories

I have used Percona XtraBackup to create a compressed backup, but now I need to decompress the files. The instructions say I should run: for bf in `find . -iname "*\.qp"`; do qpress -d $bf $(dirname $...
4 votes
2 answers
4k views

Filter files generated by `find` by parsed output of `file` command

I'm writing a quick tool to inspect the contents of a node.js node_modules folder or python virtualenv for native dependencies. As a quick first approximation to this I wrote the following command. ...
-1 votes
4 answers
604 views

How to pass a file as an argument in linux and get the list of all files in it from file system?

Lets say I have a file by name searchfiles.txt with file names in it: 2345098.txt 2345099.txt 2345100.txt and so on (100 file entries) Now I want to list out or display all the file names that ...
9 votes
1 answer
4k views

substring removal in find -exec

When using $ find . -name string~ -exec cp {} FOO \; is there a way to use {} in FOO to remove the tilde character as we usually do with bash substrings e.g. : $ echo ${string%substring} I aim ...
6 votes
2 answers
2k views

Using literal empty curly braces {} inside sed command from find -exec

I'm wondering if it is possible to include empty curly braces {} inside a sed replacement called from a find -exec. An example: find "$dir" -type f -name "*" -exec sed -i s/hello{}a/hello{}b/g '{}' +...
-1 votes
2 answers
778 views

bash: Deleting directories not containing given strings

How can I delete directories using the bash that do not contain directories named wav or mp3? I use macOS Sierra. find . -type d \! -exec test -e '{}/wav' \; -print finds the directories not ...
2 votes
1 answer
3k views

Find files by change date [duplicate]

I'd like to search recursively for files with a specific Change date. Note, this is not the Access or Modify date, but the Change date as outputted by stat. #stat prototype.js File: `prototype.js' ...
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

Mute gzip errors/warnings when using zgrep

I frequently use the commands like find . ! -iname "*test*" -o -iname "*foo*" | xargs zgrep -ie first.*last -e last.*first I use zgrep because it can grep through .gz files, and if the files aren't ...
0 votes
2 answers
4k views

Finding unmanaged files that are older than 6 months

I'm trying to find all files that haven't been touched for 6 months or longer. I ran this command but it just shows all files that were edited 6 months a go. find . -type f -mtime 183 -exec ls -latr ...
1 vote
0 answers
279 views

Find directory containing file; execute command in that dir; then delete files

I want to find all directories (recursively) which contain .cue files, execute a command in that directory, then delete all files in that directory with the same prefix as the .cue file. find . -name ...
2 votes
1 answer
1k views

Combining basename {} and string's operations in bash

I want to write a script to find all the files ending with .cpp and rename them as .cc. The search will be done recursively from a start route R, which is the script's argument. If no argument is ...
1 vote
2 answers
1k views

Using mv to move to another directory and rename at once

I would like to know every file which is +100Mb and hasn't been accessed in the last month, and I have written succesfully: find / -size +100M -atime +30 And now I want to move those files to a ...
3 votes
2 answers
2k views

Remove 50GB oldest files in busybox when used capacity reaches 95%

Ok I have requested a code here but initial I didn't ask to make it busybox compatible. My bad. I'm new to Linux and coding. The code needs to do the following: Delete 50GB of oldest data (dir ...
6 votes
2 answers
7k views

Find files by character encoding

I have a long-running python script that failed to utf-8 decode a file. The error message doesn't tell me what file it failed on, only that it couldn't decode byte 0x81 in position 194. I know which ...
3 votes
3 answers
12k views

How can I pass strings with single quotes to grep?

My desired outcome is the following: to recursively search a directory looking for a given string in all found files. The following command is my usual port of call: find ./ | xargs grep -ns 'foobar' ...
3 votes
2 answers
6k views

Delete multiple patterns of files using one command (find)

I am trying to find and delete files in current directory and subdirectories (recursively) which match different patterns and print the matching files to stdout to know which ones are deleted. For ...
2 votes
3 answers
6k views

Find to list all files with date pattern to tar them together

I have a directory with many log files, with filenames like acct.20111001 up to acct.20111030. I want to zip them by running: tar -cvjf acct.20111001.bz2 acct.20111001 How can I use find to ...
3 votes
1 answer
8k views

find log files older than 30 days period

I'm working on a script to find files older than 30 days in a given folder. Based on requirement i have to delete only files with extension .log or .out and skip sub directories. The below command ...
2 votes
4 answers
4k views

Find size of directories recursively and get a total

I am using this command to find the folders I want and count up the size. find . -type d -name 'tmp_c*' | xargs du -hcs {} \; + My version of find does not support -exec. But, this works. However ...
2 votes
3 answers
2k views

Batch rename folders with a single bash command

I have folders setup like this: /path/to/directory/SLUG_1/SLUG_1 - SLUG_2 - SLUG_3 SLUG_2 is a year, and it may have a letter after the year, like "1994" or "2003a". I would like to rename those ...
1 vote
0 answers
55 views

Find files inside sub-directories with different names (to remove them with mtime)

I have a set of client folders on a server. Each client has backups inside a "backup" directory like so; ~/backups/<CLIENT_NAME>/{daily, weekly, monthly}/{databases, directories, logs} I'd ...
1 vote
1 answer
867 views

How would I find uneven file permissions within a directory structure?

How could I go about finding uneven file/directory permissions within a directory structure? I've made some attempts at using the find command similar to: find /bin ! \( -perm 777 -o -perm 776 -o -...
1 vote
4 answers
251 views

How do I find a word in a file and insert text two lines below that?

I have a file that I want to find a key word in and enter text 2 lines down. For example lets say the file i have contains the following words the cow goes moo I want to be able to find the word "...
0 votes
1 answer
169 views

move file based on iso8601 date format that is 1 week old

I have a set of backups that run on a cron job every 4 hours (00:00, 04:00...etc). These files are named based on; NOW=$(date +%F-%a-%H.%M)-filename which translates to 2016-10-25-Tue-04.00-filename. ...
-2 votes
2 answers
876 views

cut a text between / / symbols

i have some below strings 2-0 854 0/413/5963 W 65.19 0 0 0.0 4.76 115.86 ::1 www.example.com GET /server-status HTTP/1.1 2-0 854 0/413/5963 W 65.19 0 0 0.0 4.76 115.86 ...
12 votes
3 answers
11k views

How to pass files found by find as arguments?

First to cut off trivial but inapplicable answers: I can use neither the find+xargs trick nor its variants (like find with -exec) because I need to use few such expressions per call. I will get back ...
1 vote
3 answers
3k views

Command find and tar in script

I'm trying write a script which requires user interaction. Basically, the script has to ask user about 3 parameters: name of the file(s) which user wants to find, the number of days during which the ...
-1 votes
1 answer
102 views

finding specific directories

I need to find all directories that begin with dirD in the directory /dirA/dirB/dirC. Basically, dirD*. So far I tried: find . -type d -name "dirD*" and ls -lrt | grep "^d" | grep "dirD*" Now I'm ...
4 votes
2 answers
25k views

find and regex - find files with names starting with given name

I need a regex expression to use along with find to find all the files which name start with a given string, for example proc. I tried with find . -regex '^proc*' but it gives me no results.
2 votes
1 answer
12k views

Find all tar.gz files and move them to a one level down directory

I have tar.gz files accessible from ./parent/subfolder/tar_file_folder/*tar.gz And I want to find them and move them into the ./parent/ directory, therefore one level up. However, there are several ...
2 votes
2 answers
305 views

find command: using {} in a path

I accidentally copied the folders in my Music directory to the parent michal directory. I want to delete these directories in one fell swoop. Is there any way to make the following work? Or is there ...
2 votes
1 answer
536 views

Grep output between XML nodes "Pattern within the main node set"

I am wondering if there is any way to accomplish this. XML Format: <Main> <Master> <Node1>Content</Node1> <Node2>qwerty</Node2> <Node3>854789</Node3> ...

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