About

find is a utility to search a directory tree for objects (files and/or directories) matching certain criteria (name, type, date, …) and print their names or perform actions on them.

The find command is invoked like

find [options] [starting-point...] [expression]

starting-point is one or more paths (absolute or relative directories). These are the places where find will start to look for files. The default starting point is the current directory .

expression is zero or more of: tests and actions (and some other types).

• Tests are used to filter the set of files you want to act upon. You can filter on types of files, filename patterns, file attributes, and so on.
• Actions are things you want to do with the files. The default action is to print the path to the file. You can specify multiple actions. Some actions are:
  • -exec -- send the filenames as arguments to some program,
  • -ls -- list them like ls -l
  • -printf -- print out your choice of attributes about the files
  • -delete -- make sure before you delete your files that you know which files will be found! -print them first.

Common idioms

List all the regular files in the current directory and its subdirectories:

find . -type f

Same, but do not recurse into directories called .svn:

find . -type d -name .svn -prune -o -type f -print

Recode all *.txt files in the current directory and its subdirectories from latin1 to utf8 (two equivalent commands):

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec recode latin1..utf8 {} +
find . -type f -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 recode latin1..utf8

Further reading

• Best way run a command on each file in a directory tree
• Find files with certain extensions
• How to apply recursively chmod directories without affecting files?
• Looping through files with spaces in the names?
• Why is looping over find's output bad practice?
• Understanding the -exec option of `find`

External references

• find specification (The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 edition)
• find(1) man page