FIND(1) General Commands Manual FIND(1)

NAME
find - search for files in a directory hierarchy
SYNOPSIS
find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D debugopts] [-Olevel] [starting-point...] [expression]
DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents the GNU version of find. GNU find searches the directory tree rooted at each
given starting-point by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of prece-
dence (see section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and opera-
tions, true for or), at which point find moves on to the next file name. If no starting-point is specified, ‘.’ is
assumed.
If you are using find in an environment where security is important (for example if you are using it to
search directories that are writable by other users), you should read the ‘Security Considerations’ chapter of
the findutils documentation, which is called Finding Files and comes with findutils. That document also
includes a lot more detail and discussion than this manual page, so you may find it a more useful source of
information.
OPTIONS
The -H, -L and -P options control the treatment of symbolic links. Command-line arguments following
these are taken to be names of files or directories to be examined, up to the first argument that begins with
‘-’, or the argument ‘(’ or ‘!’. That argument and any following arguments are taken to be the expression
describing what is to be searched for. If no paths are given, the current directory is used. If no expression
is given, the expression -print is used (but you should probably consider using -print0 instead, anyway).
This manual page talks about ‘options’ within the expression list. These options control the behaviour of
find but are specified immediately after the last path name. The five ‘real’ options -H, -L, -P, -D and -O
must appear before the first path name, if at all. A double dash -- could theoretically be used to signal that
any remaining arguments are not options, but this does not really work due to the way find determines the
end of the following path arguments: it does that by reading until an expression argument comes (which
also starts with a ‘-’). Now, if a path argument would start with a ‘-’, then find would treat it as expression
argument instead. Thus, to ensure that all start points are taken as such, and especially to prevent that wild-
card patterns expanded by the calling shell are not mistakenly treated as expression arguments, it is gener-
ally safer to prefix wildcards or dubious path names with either ‘./’ or to use absolute path names starting
with ’/’. Alternatively, it is generally safe though non-portable to use the GNU option -files0-from to pass
arbitrary starting points to find.

-P Never follow symbolic links. This is the default behaviour. When find examines or prints infor-
mation about files, and the file is a symbolic link, the information used shall be taken from the
properties of the symbolic link itself.

-L Follow symbolic links. When find examines or prints information about files, the information
used shall be taken from the properties of the file to which the link points, not from the link itself
(unless it is a broken symbolic link or find is unable to examine the file to which the link points).
Use of this option implies -noleaf. If you later use the -P option, -noleaf will still be in effect.
If -L is in effect and find discovers a symbolic link to a subdirectory during its search, the subdi-
rectory pointed to by the symbolic link will be searched.
When the -L option is in effect, the -type predicate will always match against the type of the file
that a symbolic link points to rather than the link itself (unless the symbolic link is broken). Ac-
tions that can cause symbolic links to become broken while find is executing (for example
-delete) can give rise to confusing behaviour. Using -L causes the -lname and -ilname predi-
cates always to return false.

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-H Do not follow symbolic links, except while processing the command line arguments. When find
examines or prints information about files, the information used shall be taken from the properties
of the symbolic link itself. The only exception to this behaviour is when a file specified on the
command line is a symbolic link, and the link can be resolved. For that situation, the information
used is taken from whatever the link points to (that is, the link is followed). The information about
the link itself is used as a fallback if the file pointed to by the symbolic link cannot be examined.
If -H is in effect and one of the paths specified on the command line is a symbolic link to a direc-
tory, the contents of that directory will be examined (though of course -maxdepth 0 would pre-
vent this).
If more than one of -H, -L and -P is specified, each overrides the others; the last one appearing on the
command line takes effect. Since it is the default, the -P option should be considered to be in effect unless
either -H or -L is specified.

GNU find frequently stats files during the processing of the command line itself, before any searching has
begun. These options also affect how those arguments are processed. Specifically, there are a number of
tests that compare files listed on the command line against a file we are currently considering. In each case,
the file specified on the command line will have been examined and some of its properties will have been
saved. If the named file is in fact a symbolic link, and the -P option is in effect (or if neither -H nor -L
were specified), the information used for the comparison will be taken from the properties of the symbolic
link. Otherwise, it will be taken from the properties of the file the link points to. If find cannot follow the
link (for example because it has insufficient privileges or the link points to a nonexistent file) the properties
of the link itself will be used.
When the -H or -L options are in effect, any symbolic links listed as the argument of -newer will be
dereferenced, and the timestamp will be taken from the file to which the symbolic link points. The same
consideration applies to -newerXY, -anewer and -cnewer.

The -follow option has a similar effect to -L, though it takes effect at the point where it appears (that is, if
-L is not used but -follow is, any symbolic links appearing after -follow on the command line will be
dereferenced, and those before it will not).

-D debugopts
Print diagnostic information; this can be helpful to diagnose problems with why find is not doing
what you want. The list of debug options should be comma separated. Compatibility of the debug
options is not guaranteed between releases of findutils. For a complete list of valid debug options,
see the output of find -D help. Valid debug options include
exec Show diagnostic information relating to -exec, -execdir, -ok and -okdir
opt Prints diagnostic information relating to the optimisation of the expression tree; see the
-O option.
rates Prints a summary indicating how often each predicate succeeded or failed.
search Navigate the directory tree verbosely.
stat Print messages as files are examined with the stat and lstat system calls. The find pro-
gram tries to minimise such calls.
tree Show the expression tree in its original and optimized form.
all Enable all of the other debug options (but help).
help Explain the debugging options.
-Olevel
Enables query optimisation. The find program reorders tests to speed up execution while preserv-
ing the overall effect; that is, predicates with side effects are not reordered relative to each other.
The optimisations performed at each optimisation level are as follows.

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0 Equivalent to optimisation level 1.

1 This is the default optimisation level and corresponds to the traditional behaviour. Ex-
pressions are reordered so that tests based only on the names of files (for example -name
and -regex) are performed first.
2 Any -type or -xtype tests are performed after any tests based only on the names of files,
but before any tests that require information from the inode. On many modern versions
of Unix, file types are returned by readdir() and so these predicates are faster to evaluate
than predicates which need to stat the file first. If you use the -fstype FOO predicate and
specify a filesystem type FOO which is not known (that is, present in ‘/etc/mtab’) at the
time find starts, that predicate is equivalent to -false.
3 At this optimisation level, the full cost-based query optimizer is enabled. The order of
tests is modified so that cheap (i.e. fast) tests are performed first and more expensive ones
are performed later, if necessary. Within each cost band, predicates are evaluated earlier
or later according to whether they are likely to succeed or not. For -o, predicates which
are likely to succeed are evaluated earlier, and for -a, predicates which are likely to fail
are evaluated earlier.
The cost-based optimizer has a fixed idea of how likely any given test is to succeed. In some cases
the probability takes account of the specific nature of the test (for example, -type f is assumed to
be more likely to succeed than -type c). The cost-based optimizer is currently being evaluated. If
it does not actually improve the performance of find, it will be removed again. Conversely, opti-
misations that prove to be reliable, robust and effective may be enabled at lower optimisation lev-
els over time. However, the default behaviour (i.e. optimisation level 1) will not be changed in the
4.3.x release series. The findutils test suite runs all the tests on find at each optimisation level and
ensures that the result is the same.

The re-ordering of operations performed by the cost-based optimizer can result in user-visible be-
haviour change. For example, the -readable and -empty predicates are sensitive to re-ordering.
If they are run in the order -empty -readable, an error message will be issued for unreadable di-
rectories. If they are run in the order -readable -empty no error message will be issued. This is
the reason why such operation re-ordering is not performed at the default optimisation level.
EXPRESSION
The part of the command line after the list of starting points is the expression. This is a kind of query spec-
ification describing how we match files and what we do with the files that were matched. An expression is
composed of a sequence of things:

Tests Tests return a true or false value, usually on the basis of some property of a file we are considering.
The -empty test for example is true only when the current file is empty.

Actions
Actions have side effects (such as printing something on the standard output) and return either true
or false, usually based on whether or not they are successful. The -print action for example prints
the name of the current file on the standard output.

Global options
Global options affect the operation of tests and actions specified on any part of the command line.
Global options always return true. The -depth option for example makes find traverse the file
system in a depth-first order.

Positional options
Positional options affect only tests or actions which follow them. Positional options always return
true. The -regextype option for example is positional, specifying the regular expression dialect

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for regular expressions occurring later on the command line.

Operators
Operators join together the other items within the expression. They include for example -o
(meaning logical OR) and -a (meaning logical AND). Where an operator is missing, -a is as-
sumed.

The -print action is performed on all files for which the whole expression is true, unless it contains an ac-
tion other than -prune or -quit. Actions which inhibit the default -print are -delete, -exec, -execdir,
-ok, -okdir, -fls, -fprint, -fprintf, -ls, -print and -printf.

The -delete action also acts like an option (since it implies -depth).

POSITIONAL OPTIONS
Positional options always return true. They affect only tests occurring later on the command line.

-daystart
Measure times (for -amin, -atime, -cmin, -ctime, -mmin, and -mtime) from the beginning of
today rather than from 24 hours ago. This option only affects tests which appear later on the com-
mand line.

-follow
Deprecated; use the -L option instead. Dereference symbolic links. Implies -noleaf. The -fol-
low option affects only those tests which appear after it on the command line. Unless the -H or
-L option has been specified, the position of the -follow option changes the behaviour of the
-newer predicate; any files listed as the argument of -newer will be dereferenced if they are sym-
bolic links. The same consideration applies to -newerXY, -anewer and -cnewer. Similarly, the
-type predicate will always match against the type of the file that a symbolic link points to rather
than the link itself. Using -follow causes the -lname and -ilname predicates always to return
false.

-regextype type
Changes the regular expression syntax understood by -regex and -iregex tests which occur later
on the command line. To see which regular expression types are known, use -regextype help.
The Texinfo documentation (see SEE ALSO) explains the meaning of and differences between
the various types of regular expression. If you do not use this option, find behaves as if the regular
expression type emacs had been specified.

-warn, -nowarn
Turn warning messages on or off. These warnings apply only to the command line usage, not to
any conditions that find might encounter when it searches directories. The default behaviour cor-
responds to -warn if standard input is a tty, and to -nowarn otherwise. If a warning message re-
lating to command-line usage is produced, the exit status of find is not affected. If the
POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, and -warn is also used, it is not specified
which, if any, warnings will be active.

GLOBAL OPTIONS
Global options always return true. Global options take effect even for tests which occur earlier on the com-
mand line. To prevent confusion, global options should be specified on the command-line after the list of
start points, just before the first test, positional option or action. If you specify a global option in some

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other place, find will issue a warning message explaining that this can be confusing.

The global options occur after the list of start points, and so are not the same kind of option as -L, for ex-
ample.

-d A synonym for -depth, for compatibility with FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOS X and OpenBSD.

-depth Process each directory’s contents before the directory itself. The -delete action also implies
-depth.

-files0-from file
Read the starting points from file instead of getting them on the command line. In contrast to the
known limitations of passing starting points via arguments on the command line, namely the limi-
tation of the amount of file names, and the inherent ambiguity of file names clashing with option
names, using this option allows to safely pass an arbitrary number of starting points to find.

Using this option and passing starting points on the command line is mutually exclusive, and is
therefore not allowed at the same time.

The file argument is mandatory. One can use -files0-from - to read the list of starting points
from the standard input stream, and e.g. from a pipe. In this case, the actions -ok and -okdir are
not allowed, because they would obviously interfere with reading from standard input in order to
get a user confirmation.

The starting points in file have to be separated by ASCII NUL characters. Two consecutive NUL
characters, i.e., a starting point with a Zero-length file name is not allowed and will lead to an error
diagnostic followed by a non-Zero exit code later.

In the case the given file is empty, find does not process any starting point and therefore will exit
immediately after parsing the program arguments. This is unlike the standard invocation where
find assumes the current directory as starting point if no path argument is passed.

The processing of the starting points is otherwise as usual, e.g. find will recurse into subdirecto-
ries unless otherwise prevented. To process only the starting points, one can additionally pass
-maxdepth 0.

Further notes: if a file is listed more than once in the input file, it is unspecified whether it is vis-
ited more than once. If the file is mutated during the operation of find, the result is unspecified as
well. Finally, the seek position within the named file at the time find exits, be it with -quit or in
any other way, is also unspecified. By "unspecified" here is meant that it may or may not work or
do any specific thing, and that the behavior may change from platform to platform, or from findu-
tils release to release.

-help, --help
Print a summary of the command-line usage of find and exit.

-ignore_readdir_race
Normally, find will emit an error message when it fails to stat a file. If you give this option and a
file is deleted between the time find reads the name of the file from the directory and the time it
tries to stat the file, no error message will be issued. This also applies to files or directories whose
names are given on the command line. This option takes effect at the time the command line is
read, which means that you cannot search one part of the filesystem with this option on and part of

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it with this option off (if you need to do that, you will need to issue two find commands instead,
one with the option and one without it).

Furthermore, find with the -ignore_readdir_race option will ignore errors of the -delete action
in the case the file has disappeared since the parent directory was read: it will not output an error
diagnostic, and the return code of the -delete action will be true.

-maxdepth levels
Descend at most levels (a non-negative integer) levels of directories below the starting-points. Us-
ing -maxdepth 0 means only apply the tests and actions to the starting-points themselves.

-mindepth levels
Do not apply any tests or actions at levels less than levels (a non-negative integer). Using -min-
depth 1 means process all files except the starting-points.

-mount
Don’t descend directories on other filesystems. An alternate name for -xdev, for compatibility
with some other versions of find.

-noignore_readdir_race
Turns off the effect of -ignore_readdir_race.

-noleaf Do not optimize by assuming that directories contain 2 fewer subdirectories than their hard link
count. This option is needed when searching filesystems that do not follow the Unix directory-link
convention, such as CD-ROM or MS-DOS filesystems or AFS volume mount points. Each direc-
tory on a normal Unix filesystem has at least 2 hard links: its name and its ‘.’ entry. Additionally,
its subdirectories (if any) each have a ‘..’ entry linked to that directory. When find is examining a
directory, after it has statted 2 fewer subdirectories than the directory’s link count, it knows that
the rest of the entries in the directory are non-directories (‘leaf’ files in the directory tree). If only
the files’ names need to be examined, there is no need to stat them; this gives a significant increase
in search speed.

-version, --version
Print the find version number and exit.

-xdev Don’t descend directories on other filesystems.

TESTS
Some tests, for example -newerXY and -samefile, allow comparison between the file currently being ex-
amined and some reference file specified on the command line. When these tests are used, the interpreta-
tion of the reference file is determined by the options -H, -L and -P and any previous -follow, but the ref-
erence file is only examined once, at the time the command line is parsed. If the reference file cannot be
examined (for example, the stat(2) system call fails for it), an error message is issued, and find exits with a
nonzero status.
A numeric argument n can be specified to tests (like -amin, -mtime, -gid, -inum, -links, -size, -uid and
-used) as
+n for greater than n,
-n for less than n,

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n for exactly n.
Supported tests:

-amin n
File was last accessed less than, more than or exactly n minutes ago.

-anewer reference
Time of the last access of the current file is more recent than that of the last data modification of
the reference file. If reference is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in effect,
then the time of the last data modification of the file it points to is always used.

-atime n
File was last accessed less than, more than or exactly n*24 hours ago. When find figures out how
many 24-hour periods ago the file was last accessed, any fractional part is ignored, so to match
-atime +1, a file has to have been accessed at least two days ago.

-cmin n
File’s status was last changed less than, more than or exactly n minutes ago.

-cnewer reference
Time of the last status change of the current file is more recent than that of the last data modifica-
tion of the reference file. If reference is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in
effect, then the time of the last data modification of the file it points to is always used.

-ctime n
File’s status was last changed less than, more than or exactly n*24 hours ago. See the comments
for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of file status change times.

-empty File is empty and is either a regular file or a directory.

-executable
Matches files which are executable and directories which are searchable (in a file name resolution
sense) by the current user. This takes into account access control lists and other permissions arte-
facts which the -perm test ignores. This test makes use of the access(2) system call, and so can
be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squashing), since many systems imple-
ment access(2) in the client’s kernel and so cannot make use of the UID mapping information held
on the server. Because this test is based only on the result of the access(2) system call, there is no
guarantee that a file for which this test succeeds can actually be executed.

-false Always false.

-fstype type
File is on a filesystem of type type. The valid filesystem types vary among different versions of
Unix; an incomplete list of filesystem types that are accepted on some version of Unix or another
is: ufs, 4.2, 4.3, nfs, tmp, mfs, S51K, S52K. You can use -printf with the %F directive to see the
types of your filesystems.

-gid n File’s numeric group ID is less than, more than or exactly n.

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-group gname
File belongs to group gname (numeric group ID allowed).

-ilname pattern
Like -lname, but the match is case insensitive. If the -L option or the -follow option is in effect,
this test returns false unless the symbolic link is broken.

-iname pattern
Like -name, but the match is case insensitive. For example, the patterns ‘fo*’ and ‘F??’ match
the file names ‘Foo’, ‘FOO’, ‘foo’, ‘fOo’, etc. The pattern ‘*foo*‘ will also match a file called
’.foobar’.

-inum n
File has inode number smaller than, greater than or exactly n. It is normally easier to use the
-samefile test instead.

-ipath pattern
Like -path. but the match is case insensitive.

-iregex pattern
Like -regex, but the match is case insensitive.

-iwholename pattern
See -ipath. This alternative is less portable than -ipath.

-links n
File has less than, more than or exactly n hard links.

-lname pattern
File is a symbolic link whose contents match shell pattern pattern. The metacharacters do not
treat ‘/’ or ‘.’ specially. If the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, this test returns false
unless the symbolic link is broken.

-mmin n
File’s data was last modified less than, more than or exactly n minutes ago.

-mtime n
File’s data was last modified less than, more than or exactly n*24 hours ago. See the comments
for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of file modification times.

-name pattern
Base of file name (the path with the leading directories removed) matches shell pattern pattern.
Because the leading directories of the file names are removed, the pattern should not include a
slash, because ‘-name a/b’ will never match anything (and you probably want to use -path in-
stead). An exception to this is when using only a slash as pattern (‘-name /’), because that is a
valid string for matching the root directory "/" (because the base name of "/" is "/"). A warning is
issued if you try to pass a pattern containing a - but not consisting solely of one - slash, unless the
environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set or the option -nowarn is used.

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To ignore a directory and the files under it, use -prune rather than checking every file in the tree;
see an example in the description of that action. Braces are not recognised as being special, de-
spite the fact that some shells including Bash imbue braces with a special meaning in shell pat-
terns. The filename matching is performed with the use of the fnmatch(3) library function. Don’t
forget to enclose the pattern in quotes in order to protect it from expansion by the shell.

-newer reference
Time of the last data modification of the current file is more recent than that of the last data modifi-
cation of the reference file. If reference is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in
effect, then the time of the last data modification of the file it points to is always used.

-newerXY reference
Succeeds if timestamp X of the file being considered is newer than timestamp Y of the file refer-
ence. The letters X and Y can be any of the following letters:

a The access time of the file reference

B The birth time of the file reference
c The inode status change time of reference
m The modification time of the file reference
t reference is interpreted directly as a time

Some combinations are invalid; for example, it is invalid for X to be t. Some combinations are not
implemented on all systems; for example B is not supported on all systems. If an invalid or unsup-
ported combination of XY is specified, a fatal error results. Time specifications are interpreted as
for the argument to the -d option of GNU date. If you try to use the birth time of a reference file,
and the birth time cannot be determined, a fatal error message results. If you specify a test which
refers to the birth time of files being examined, this test will fail for any files where the birth time
is unknown.

-nogroup
No group corresponds to file’s numeric group ID.

-nouser
No user corresponds to file’s numeric user ID.

-path pattern
File name matches shell pattern pattern. The metacharacters do not treat ‘/’ or ‘.’ specially; so,
for example,
find . -path "./sr*sc"
will print an entry for a directory called ./src/misc (if one exists). To ignore a whole directory tree,
use -prune rather than checking every file in the tree. Note that the pattern match test applies to
the whole file name, starting from one of the start points named on the command line. It would
only make sense to use an absolute path name here if the relevant start point is also an absolute
path. This means that this command will never match anything:
find bar -path /foo/bar/myfile -print
Find compares the -path argument with the concatenation of a directory name and the base name
of the file it’s examining. Since the concatenation will never end with a slash, -path arguments
ending in a slash will match nothing (except perhaps a start point specified on the command line).
The predicate -path is also supported by HP-UX find and is part of the POSIX 2008 standard.

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-perm mode
File’s permission bits are exactly mode (octal or symbolic). Since an exact match is required, if
you want to use this form for symbolic modes, you may have to specify a rather complex mode
string. For example ‘-perm g=w’ will only match files which have mode 0020 (that is, ones for
which group write permission is the only permission set). It is more likely that you will want to
use the ‘/’ or ‘-’ forms, for example ‘-perm -g=w’, which matches any file with group write per-
mission. See the EXAMPLES section for some illustrative examples.

-perm -mode
All of the permission bits mode are set for the file. Symbolic modes are accepted in this form, and
this is usually the way in which you would want to use them. You must specify ‘u’, ‘g’ or ‘o’ if
you use a symbolic mode. See the EXAMPLES section for some illustrative examples.

-perm /mode
Any of the permission bits mode are set for the file. Symbolic modes are accepted in this form.
You must specify ‘u’, ‘g’ or ‘o’ if you use a symbolic mode. See the EXAMPLES section for
some illustrative examples. If no permission bits in mode are set, this test matches any file (the
idea here is to be consistent with the behaviour of -perm -000).

-perm +mode
This is no longer supported (and has been deprecated since 2005). Use -perm /mode instead.

-readable
Matches files which are readable by the current user. This takes into account access control lists
and other permissions artefacts which the -perm test ignores. This test makes use of the ac-
cess(2) system call, and so can be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squash-
ing), since many systems implement access(2) in the client’s kernel and so cannot make use of the
UID mapping information held on the server.

-regex pattern
File name matches regular expression pattern. This is a match on the whole path, not a search.
For example, to match a file named ./fubar3, you can use the regular expression ‘.*bar.’ or
‘.*b.*3’, but not ‘f.*r3’. The regular expressions understood by find are by default Emacs Regular
Expressions, but this can be changed with the -regextype option.

-samefile name
File refers to the same inode as name. When -L is in effect, this can include symbolic links.

-size n[cwbkMG]
File uses less than, more than or exactly n units of space, rounding up. The following suffixes can
be used:
‘b’ for 512-byte blocks (this is the default if no suffix is used)
‘c’ for bytes
‘w’ for two-byte words
‘k’ for kibibytes (KiB, units of 1024 bytes)
‘M’ for mebibytes (MiB, units of 1024 * 1024 = 1 048 576 bytes)
‘G’ for gibibytes (GiB, units of 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1 073 741 824 bytes)
The size is simply the st_size member of the struct stat populated by the lstat (or stat) system call,
rounded up as shown above. In other words, it’s consistent with the result you get for ls -l. Bear

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in mind that the ‘%k’ and ‘%b’ format specifiers of -printf handle sparse files differently. The ‘b’
suffix always denotes 512-byte blocks and never 1024-byte blocks, which is different to the behav-
iour of -ls.
The + and - prefixes signify greater than and less than, as usual; i.e., an exact size of n units does
not match. Bear in mind that the size is rounded up to the next unit. Therefore -size -1M is not
equivalent to -size -1 048 576c. The former only matches empty files, the latter matches files
from 0 to 1,048,575 bytes.
-true Always true.

-type c File is of type c:

b block (buffered) special
c character (unbuffered) special
d directory
p named pipe (FIFO)
f regular file
l symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, unless
the symbolic link is broken. If you want to search for symbolic links when -L is in ef-
fect, use -xtype.
s socket
D door (Solaris)
To search for more than one type at once, you can supply the combined list of type letters sepa-
rated by a comma ‘,’ (GNU extension).
-uid n File’s numeric user ID is less than, more than or exactly n.

-used n
File was last accessed less than, more than or exactly n days after its status was last changed.

-user uname
File is owned by user uname (numeric user ID allowed).

-wholename pattern
See -path. This alternative is less portable than -path.

-writable
Matches files which are writable by the current user. This takes into account access control lists
and other permissions artefacts which the -perm test ignores. This test makes use of the ac-
cess(2) system call, and so can be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squash-
ing), since many systems implement access(2) in the client’s kernel and so cannot make use of the
UID mapping information held on the server.

-xtype c
The same as -type unless the file is a symbolic link. For symbolic links: if the -H or -P option
was specified, true if the file is a link to a file of type c; if the -L option has been given, true if c is
‘l’. In other words, for symbolic links, -xtype checks the type of the file that -type does not
check. If a symbolic link is broken (because the thing it points to does not exist or the link points
to itself) then -xtype will behave the same as -type.

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-context pattern
(SELinux only) Security context of the file matches glob pattern.

ACTIONS
-delete Delete files or directories; true if removal succeeded. If the removal failed, an error message is is-
sued and find’s exit status will be nonzero (when it eventually exits).

Warning: Don’t forget that find evaluates the command line as an expression, so putting -delete
first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.

The use of the -delete action on the command line automatically turns on the -depth option. As
in turn -depth makes -prune ineffective, the -delete action cannot usefully be combined with
-prune.

Often, the user might want to test a find command line with -print prior to adding -delete for the
actual removal run. To avoid surprising results, it is usually best to remember to use -depth ex-
plicitly during those earlier test runs.

The -delete action will fail to remove a directory unless it is empty.

Together with the -ignore_readdir_race option, find will ignore errors of the -delete action in
the case the file has disappeared since the parent directory was read: it will not output an error di-
agnostic, not change the exit code to nonzero, and the return code of the -delete action will be
true.

-exec command ;
Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following arguments to find are taken to be ar-
guments to the command until an argument consisting of ‘;’ is encountered. The string ‘{}’ is re-
placed by the current file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the com-
mand, not just in arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these construc-
tions might need to be escaped (with a ‘\’) or quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell.
See the EXAMPLES section for examples of the use of the -exec option. The specified com-
mand is run once for each matched file. The command is executed in the starting directory. There
are unavoidable security problems surrounding use of the -exec action; you should use the -ex-
ecdir option instead.

-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the com-
mand line is built by appending each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations
of the command will be much less than the number of matched files. The command line is built in
much the same way that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of ‘{}’ is allowed
within the command, and it must appear at the end, immediately before the ‘+’; it needs to be es-
caped (with a ‘\’) or quoted to protect it from interpretation by the shell. The command is exe-
cuted in the starting directory. If any invocation with the ‘+’ form returns a non-zero value as exit
status, then find returns a non-zero exit status. If find encounters an error, this can sometimes
cause an immediate exit, so some pending commands may not be run at all. For this reason
-exec my-command ... {} + -quit may not result in my-command actually being run. This variant
of -exec always returns true.

-execdir command ;

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-execdir command {} +
Like -exec, but the specified command is run from the subdirectory containing the matched file,
which is not normally the directory in which you started find. As with -exec, the {} should be
quoted if find is being invoked from a shell. This a much more secure method for invoking com-
mands, as it avoids race conditions during resolution of the paths to the matched files. As with the
-exec action, the ‘+’ form of -execdir will build a command line to process more than one
matched file, but any given invocation of command will only list files that exist in the same subdi-
rectory. If you use this option, you must ensure that your PATH environment variable does not
reference ‘.’; otherwise, an attacker can run any commands they like by leaving an appropriately-
named file in a directory in which you will run -execdir. The same applies to having entries in
PATH which are empty or which are not absolute directory names. If any invocation with the ‘+’
form returns a non-zero value as exit status, then find returns a non-zero exit status. If find en-
counters an error, this can sometimes cause an immediate exit, so some pending commands may
not be run at all. The result of the action depends on whether the + or the ; variant is being used;
-execdir command {} + always returns true, while -execdir command {} ; returns true only if
command returns 0.

-fls file True; like -ls but write to file like -fprint. The output file is always created, even if the predicate
is never matched. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual
characters in filenames are handled.

-fprint file
True; print the full file name into file file. If file does not exist when find is run, it is created; if it
does exist, it is truncated. The file names /dev/stdout and /dev/stderr are handled specially; they
refer to the standard output and standard error output, respectively. The output file is always cre-
ated, even if the predicate is never matched. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for infor-
mation about how unusual characters in filenames are handled.

-fprint0 file
True; like -print0 but write to file like -fprint. The output file is always created, even if the pred-
icate is never matched. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how un-
usual characters in filenames are handled.

-fprintf file format

True; like -printf but write to file like -fprint. The output file is always created, even if the predi-
cate is never matched. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how un-
usual characters in filenames are handled.

-ls True; list current file in ls -dils format on standard output. The block counts are of 1 KB blocks,
unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, in which case 512-byte blocks are
used. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual characters in
filenames are handled.

-ok command ;
Like -exec but ask the user first. If the user agrees, run the command. Otherwise just return false.
If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from /dev/null. This action may not be
specified together with the -files0-from option.

The response to the prompt is matched against a pair of regular expressions to determine if it is an
affirmative or negative response. This regular expression is obtained from the system if the
POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, or otherwise from find’s message

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translations. If the system has no suitable definition, find’s own definition will be used. In either
case, the interpretation of the regular expression itself will be affected by the environment vari-
ables LC_CTYPE (character classes) and LC_COLLATE (character ranges and equivalence
classes).

-okdir command ;
Like -execdir but ask the user first in the same way as for -ok. If the user does not agree, just re-
turn false. If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from /dev/null. This action may
not be specified together with the -files0-from option.

-print True; print the full file name on the standard output, followed by a newline. If you are piping the
output of find into another program and there is the faintest possibility that the files which you are
searching for might contain a newline, then you should seriously consider using the -print0 op-
tion instead of -print. See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how un-
usual characters in filenames are handled.

-print0 True; print the full file name on the standard output, followed by a null character (instead of the
newline character that -print uses). This allows file names that contain newlines or other types of
white space to be correctly interpreted by programs that process the find output. This option cor-
responds to the -0 option of xargs.

-printf format
True; print format on the standard output, interpreting ‘\’ escapes and ‘%’ directives. Field widths
and precisions can be specified as with the printf(3) C function. Please note that many of the
fields are printed as %s rather than %d, and this may mean that flags don’t work as you might ex-
pect. This also means that the ‘-’ flag does work (it forces fields to be left-aligned). Unlike
-print, -printf does not add a newline at the end of the string. The escapes and directives are:
\a Alarm bell.
\b Backspace.
\c Stop printing from this format immediately and flush the output.
\f Form feed.
\n Newline.
\r Carriage return.
\t Horizontal tab.
\v Vertical tab.
\0 ASCII NUL.
\\ A literal backslash (‘\’).
\NNN The character whose ASCII code is NNN (octal).
A ‘\’ character followed by any other character is treated as an ordinary character, so they both are
printed.
%% A literal percent sign.
%a File’s last access time in the format returned by the C ctime(3) function.

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%Ak File’s last access time in the format specified by k, which is either ‘@’ or a directive for
the C strftime(3) function. The following shows an incomplete list of possible values for
k. Please refer to the documentation of strftime(3) for the full list. Some of the conver-
sion specification characters might not be available on all systems, due to differences in
the implementation of the strftime(3) library function.
@ seconds since Jan. 1, 1970, 00:00 GMT, with fractional part.
Time fields:
H hour (00..23)
I hour (01..12)
k hour ( 0..23)
l hour ( 1..12)
M minute (00..59)
p locale’s AM or PM
r time, 12-hour (hh:mm:ss [AP]M)
S Second (00.00 .. 61.00). There is a fractional part.
T time, 24-hour (hh:mm:ss.xxxxxxxxxx)
+ Date and time, separated by ‘+’, for example ‘2004-04-28+22:22:05.0’. This is
a GNU extension. The time is given in the current timezone (which may be af-
fected by setting the TZ environment variable). The seconds field includes a
fractional part.
X locale’s time representation (H:M:S). The seconds field includes a fractional
part.
Z time zone (e.g., EDT), or nothing if no time zone is determinable
Date fields:
a locale’s abbreviated weekday name (Sun..Sat)
A locale’s full weekday name, variable length (Sunday..Saturday)
b locale’s abbreviated month name (Jan..Dec)
B locale’s full month name, variable length (January..December)
c locale’s date and time (Sat Nov 04 12:02:33 EST 1989). The format is the same
as for ctime(3) and so to preserve compatibility with that format, there is no
fractional part in the seconds field.
d day of month (01..31)
D date (mm/dd/yy)
F date (yyyy-mm-dd)
h same as b
j day of year (001..366)
m month (01..12)
U week number of year with Sunday as first day of week (00..53)
w day of week (0..6)
W week number of year with Monday as first day of week (00..53)

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x locale’s date representation (mm/dd/yy)

y last two digits of year (00..99)
Y year (1970...)
%b The amount of disk space used for this file in 512-byte blocks. Since disk space is allo-
cated in multiples of the filesystem block size this is usually greater than %s/512, but it
can also be smaller if the file is a sparse file.

%Bk File’s birth time, i.e., its creation time, in the format specified by k, which is the same as
for %A. This directive produces an empty string if the underlying operating system or
filesystem does not support birth times.

%c File’s last status change time in the format returned by the C ctime(3) function.
%Ck File’s last status change time in the format specified by k, which is the same as for %A.
%d File’s depth in the directory tree; 0 means the file is a starting-point.
%D The device number on which the file exists (the st_dev field of struct stat), in decimal.
%f Print the basename; the file’s name with any leading directories removed (only the last el-
ement). For /, the result is ‘/’. See the EXAMPLES section for an example.

%F Type of the filesystem the file is on; this value can be used for -fstype.
%g File’s group name, or numeric group ID if the group has no name.
%G File’s numeric group ID.
%h Dirname; the Leading directories of the file’s name (all but the last element). If the file
name contains no slashes (since it is in the current directory) the %h specifier expands to
‘.’. For files which are themselves directories and contain a slash (including /), %h ex-
pands to the empty string. See the EXAMPLES section for an example.
%H Starting-point under which file was found.
%i File’s inode number (in decimal).
%k The amount of disk space used for this file in 1 KB blocks. Since disk space is allocated
in multiples of the filesystem block size this is usually greater than %s/1024, but it can
also be smaller if the file is a sparse file.
%l Object of symbolic link (empty string if file is not a symbolic link).
%m File’s permission bits (in octal). This option uses the ‘traditional’ numbers which most
Unix implementations use, but if your particular implementation uses an unusual ordering
of octal permissions bits, you will see a difference between the actual value of the file’s
mode and the output of %m. Normally you will want to have a leading zero on this num-
ber, and to do this, you should use the # flag (as in, for example, ‘%#m’).
%M File’s permissions (in symbolic form, as for ls). This directive is supported in findutils
4.2.5 and later.
%n Number of hard links to file.
%p File’s name.
%P File’s name with the name of the starting-point under which it was found removed.
%s File’s size in bytes.
%S File’s sparseness. This is calculated as (BLOCKSIZE*st_blocks / st_size). The exact
value you will get for an ordinary file of a certain length is system-dependent. However,
normally sparse files will have values less than 1.0, and files which use indirect blocks

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may have a value which is greater than 1.0. In general the number of blocks used by a
file is file system dependent. The value used for BLOCKSIZE is system-dependent, but
is usually 512 bytes. If the file size is zero, the value printed is undefined. On systems
which lack support for st_blocks, a file’s sparseness is assumed to be 1.0.
%t File’s last modification time in the format returned by the C ctime(3) function.
%Tk File’s last modification time in the format specified by k, which is the same as for %A.
%u File’s user name, or numeric user ID if the user has no name.
%U File’s numeric user ID.
%y File’s type (like in ls -l), U=unknown type (shouldn’t happen)
%Y File’s type (like %y), plus follow symbolic links: ‘L’=loop, ‘N’=nonexistent, ‘?’ for any
other error when determining the type of the target of a symbolic link.
%Z (SELinux only) file’s security context.
%{ %[ %(
Reserved for future use.
A ‘%’ character followed by any other character is discarded, but the other character is printed
(don’t rely on this, as further format characters may be introduced). A ‘%’ at the end of the format
argument causes undefined behaviour since there is no following character. In some locales, it
may hide your door keys, while in others it may remove the final page from the novel you are
reading.

The %m and %d directives support the #, 0 and + flags, but the other directives do not, even if they
print numbers. Numeric directives that do not support these flags include G, U, b, D, k and n.
The ‘-’ format flag is supported and changes the alignment of a field from right-justified (which is
the default) to left-justified.
See the UNUSUAL FILENAMES section for information about how unusual characters in file-
names are handled.

-prune True; if the file is a directory, do not descend into it. If -depth is given, then -prune has no ef-
fect. Because -delete implies -depth, you cannot usefully use -prune and -delete together. For
example, to skip the directory src/emacs and all files and directories under it, and print the names
of the other files found, do something like this:
find . -path ./src/emacs -prune -o -print

-quit Exit immediately (with return value zero if no errors have occurred). This is different to -prune
because -prune only applies to the contents of pruned directories, while -quit simply makes find
stop immediately. No child processes will be left running. Any command lines which have been
built by -exec ... + or -execdir ... + are invoked before the program is exited. After -quit is exe-
cuted, no more files specified on the command line will be processed. For example,
‘find /tmp/foo /tmp/bar -print -quit‘ will print only ‘/tmp/foo‘.
One common use of -quit is to stop searching the file system once we have found what we want.
For example, if we want to find just a single file we can do this:
find / -name needle -print -quit

OPERATORS
Listed in order of decreasing precedence:

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FIND(1) General Commands Manual FIND(1)

( expr ) Force precedence. Since parentheses are special to the shell, you will normally need to quote
them. Many of the examples in this manual page use backslashes for this purpose: ‘\(...\)’ instead
of ‘(...)’.

! expr True if expr is false. This character will also usually need protection from interpretation by the
shell.

-not expr
Same as ! expr, but not POSIX compliant.

expr1 expr2
Two expressions in a row are taken to be joined with an implied -a; expr2 is not evaluated if expr1
is false.

expr1 -a expr2
Same as expr1 expr2.

expr1 -and expr2

Same as expr1 expr2, but not POSIX compliant.

expr1 -o expr2
Or; expr2 is not evaluated if expr1 is true.

expr1 -or expr2

Same as expr1 -o expr2, but not POSIX compliant.

expr1 , expr2
List; both expr1 and expr2 are always evaluated. The value of expr1 is discarded; the value of the
list is the value of expr2. The comma operator can be useful for searching for several different
types of thing, but traversing the filesystem hierarchy only once. The -fprintf action can be used
to list the various matched items into several different output files.
Please note that -a when specified implicitly (for example by two tests appearing without an explicit opera-
tor between them) or explicitly has higher precedence than -o. This means that find . -name afile -o
-name bfile -print will never print afile.
UNUSUAL FILENAMES
Many of the actions of find result in the printing of data which is under the control of other users. This in-
cludes file names, sizes, modification times and so forth. File names are a potential problem since they can
contain any character except ‘\0’ and ‘/’. Unusual characters in file names can do unexpected and often un-
desirable things to your terminal (for example, changing the settings of your function keys on some termi-
nals). Unusual characters are handled differently by various actions, as described below.

-print0, -fprint0
Always print the exact filename, unchanged, even if the output is going to a terminal.

-ls, -fls
Unusual characters are always escaped. White space, backslash, and double quote characters are
printed using C-style escaping (for example ‘\f’, ‘\"’). Other unusual characters are printed using
an octal escape. Other printable characters (for -ls and -fls these are the characters between octal
041 and 0176) are printed as-is.

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-printf, -fprintf
If the output is not going to a terminal, it is printed as-is. Otherwise, the result depends on which
directive is in use. The directives %D, %F, %g, %G, %H, %Y, and %y expand to values which are
not under control of files’ owners, and so are printed as-is. The directives %a, %b, %c, %d, %i,
%k, %m, %M, %n, %s, %t, %u and %U have values which are under the control of files’ owners
but which cannot be used to send arbitrary data to the terminal, and so these are printed as-is. The
directives %f, %h, %l, %p and %P are quoted. This quoting is performed in the same way as for
GNU ls. This is not the same quoting mechanism as the one used for -ls and -fls. If you are able
to decide what format to use for the output of find then it is normally better to use ‘\0’ as a termi-
nator than to use newline, as file names can contain white space and newline characters. The set-
ting of the LC_CTYPE environment variable is used to determine which characters need to be
quoted.

-print, -fprint
Quoting is handled in the same way as for -printf and -fprintf. If you are using find in a script
or in a situation where the matched files might have arbitrary names, you should consider using
-print0 instead of -print.
The -ok and -okdir actions print the current filename as-is. This may change in a future release.
STANDARDS CONFORMANCE
For closest compliance to the POSIX standard, you should set the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment
variable. The following options are specified in the POSIX standard (IEEE Std 1003.1-2008, 2016 Edi-
tion):

-H This option is supported.

-L This option is supported.

-name This option is supported, but POSIX conformance depends on the POSIX conformance of the sys-
tem’s fnmatch(3) library function. As of findutils-4.2.2, shell metacharacters (‘*’, ‘?’ or ‘[]’ for
example) match a leading ‘.’, because IEEE PASC interpretation 126 requires this. This is a
change from previous versions of findutils.

-type Supported. POSIX specifies ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘l’, ‘p’, ‘f’ and ‘s’. GNU find also supports ‘D’, repre-
senting a Door, where the OS provides these. Furthermore, GNU find allows multiple types to be
specified at once in a comma-separated list.

-ok Supported. Interpretation of the response is according to the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ patterns selected by
setting the LC_MESSAGES environment variable. When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environ-
ment variable is set, these patterns are taken system’s definition of a positive (yes) or negative (no)
response. See the system’s documentation for nl_langinfo(3), in particular YESEXPR and NO-
EXPR. When POSIXLY_CORRECT is not set, the patterns are instead taken from find’s own
message catalogue.

-newer
Supported. If the file specified is a symbolic link, it is always dereferenced. This is a change from
previous behaviour, which used to take the relevant time from the symbolic link; see the HIS-
TORY section below.

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-perm Supported. If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is not set, some mode arguments
(for example +a+x) which are not valid in POSIX are supported for backward-compatibility.

Other primaries
The primaries -atime, -ctime, -depth, -exec, -group, -links, -mtime, -nogroup, -nouser,
-ok, -path, -print, -prune, -size, -user and -xdev are all supported.

The POSIX standard specifies parentheses ‘(’, ‘)’, negation ‘!’ and the logical AND/OR operators -a and
-o.
All other options, predicates, expressions and so forth are extensions beyond the POSIX standard. Many of
these extensions are not unique to GNU find, however.
The POSIX standard requires that find detects loops:
The find utility shall detect infinite loops; that is, entering a previously visited directory that is an
ancestor of the last file encountered. When it detects an infinite loop, find shall write a diagnostic
message to standard error and shall either recover its position in the hierarchy or terminate.
GNU find complies with these requirements. The link count of directories which contain entries which are
hard links to an ancestor will often be lower than they otherwise should be. This can mean that GNU find
will sometimes optimize away the visiting of a subdirectory which is actually a link to an ancestor. Since
find does not actually enter such a subdirectory, it is allowed to avoid emitting a diagnostic message. Al-
though this behaviour may be somewhat confusing, it is unlikely that anybody actually depends on this be-
haviour. If the leaf optimisation has been turned off with -noleaf, the directory entry will always be exam-
ined and the diagnostic message will be issued where it is appropriate. Symbolic links cannot be used to
create filesystem cycles as such, but if the -L option or the -follow option is in use, a diagnostic message is
issued when find encounters a loop of symbolic links. As with loops containing hard links, the leaf optimi-
sation will often mean that find knows that it doesn’t need to call stat() or chdir() on the symbolic link, so
this diagnostic is frequently not necessary.
The -d option is supported for compatibility with various BSD systems, but you should use the POSIX-
compliant option -depth instead.
The POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable does not affect the behaviour of the -regex or -iregex
tests because those tests aren’t specified in the POSIX standard.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
LANG Provides a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null.

LC_ALL
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.

LC_COLLATE
The POSIX standard specifies that this variable affects the pattern matching to be used for the
-name option. GNU find uses the fnmatch(3) library function, and so support for LC_COL-
LATE depends on the system library. This variable also affects the interpretation of the response
to -ok; while the LC_MESSAGES variable selects the actual pattern used to interpret the re-
sponse to -ok, the interpretation of any bracket expressions in the pattern will be affected by
LC_COLLATE.

LC_CTYPE
This variable affects the treatment of character classes used in regular expressions and also with
the -name test, if the system’s fnmatch(3) library function supports this. This variable also af-
fects the interpretation of any character classes in the regular expressions used to interpret the re-
sponse to the prompt issued by -ok. The LC_CTYPE environment variable will also affect
which characters are considered to be unprintable when filenames are printed; see the section

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UNUSUAL FILENAMES.

LC_MESSAGES
Determines the locale to be used for internationalised messages. If the POSIXLY_CORRECT
environment variable is set, this also determines the interpretation of the response to the prompt
made by the -ok action.

NLSPATH
Determines the location of the internationalisation message catalogues.

PATH Affects the directories which are searched to find the executables invoked by -exec, -execdir, -ok
and -okdir.

POSIXLY_CORRECT
Determines the block size used by -ls and -fls. If POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, blocks are units
of 512 bytes. Otherwise they are units of 1024 bytes.
Setting this variable also turns off warning messages (that is, implies -nowarn) by default, be-
cause POSIX requires that apart from the output for -ok, all messages printed on stderr are diag-
nostics and must result in a non-zero exit status.
When POSIXLY_CORRECT is not set, -perm +zzz is treated just like -perm /zzz if +zzz is not
a valid symbolic mode. When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, such constructs are treated as an er-
ror.
When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, the response to the prompt made by the -ok action is inter-
preted according to the system’s message catalogue, as opposed to according to find’s own mes-
sage translations.

TZ Affects the time zone used for some of the time-related format directives of -printf and -fprintf.
EXAMPLES
Simple ‘find|xargs‘ approach
• Find files named core in or below the directory /tmp and delete them.

$ find /tmp -name core -type f -print | xargs /bin/rm -f

Note that this will work incorrectly if there are any filenames containing newlines, single or dou-
ble quotes, or spaces.
Safer ‘find -print0 | xargs -0‘ approach
• Find files named core in or below the directory /tmp and delete them, processing filenames in such
a way that file or directory names containing single or double quotes, spaces or newlines are cor-
rectly handled.

$ find /tmp -name core -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

The -name test comes before the -type test in order to avoid having to call stat(2) on every file.
Note that there is still a race between the time find traverses the hierarchy printing the matching filenames,
and the time the process executed by xargs works with that file.
Processing arbitrary starting points
• Given that another program proggy pre-filters and creates a huge NUL-separated list of files,
process those as starting points, and find all regular, empty files among them:

$ proggy | find -files0-from - -maxdepth 0 -type f -empty

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The use of ‘-files0-from -‘ means to read the names of the starting points from standard input,
i.e., from the pipe; and -maxdepth 0 ensures that only explicitly those entries are examined with-
out recursing into directories (in the case one of the starting points is one).
Executing a command for each file
• Run file on every file in or below the current directory.

$ find . -type f -exec file '{}' \;

Notice that the braces are enclosed in single quote marks to protect them from interpretation as
shell script punctuation. The semicolon is similarly protected by the use of a backslash, though
single quotes could have been used in that case also.
In many cases, one might prefer the ‘-exec ... +‘ or better the ‘-execdir ... +‘ syntax for performance and
security reasons.
Traversing the filesystem just once - for 2 different actions
• Traverse the filesystem just once, listing set-user-ID files and directories into /root/suid.txt and
large files into /root/big.txt.

$ find / \
\( -perm -4000 -fprintf /root/suid.txt '%#m %u %p\n' \) , \
\( -size +100M -fprintf /root/big.txt '%-10s %p\n' \)

This example uses the line-continuation character '\' on the first two lines to instruct the shell to
continue reading the command on the next line.
Searching files by age
• Search for files in your home directory which have been modified in the last twenty-four hours.

$ find $HOME -mtime 0

This command works this way because the time since each file was last modified is divided by 24
hours and any remainder is discarded. That means that to match -mtime 0, a file will have to have
a modification in the past which is less than 24 hours ago.
Searching files by permissions
• Search for files which are executable but not readable.

$ find /sbin /usr/sbin -executable \! -readable -print

• Search for files which have read and write permission for their owner, and group, but which other
users can read but not write to.

$ find . -perm 664

Files which meet these criteria but have other permissions bits set (for example if someone can ex-
ecute the file) will not be matched.
• Search for files which have read and write permission for their owner and group, and which other
users can read, without regard to the presence of any extra permission bits (for example the exe-
cutable bit).

$ find . -perm -664

This will match a file which has mode 0777, for example.

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• Search for files which are writable by somebody (their owner, or their group, or anybody else).

$ find . -perm /222

• Search for files which are writable by either their owner or their group.

$ find . -perm /220

$ find . -perm /u+w,g+w
$ find . -perm /u=w,g=w

All three of these commands do the same thing, but the first one uses the octal representation of
the file mode, and the other two use the symbolic form. The files don’t have to be writable by both
the owner and group to be matched; either will do.
• Search for files which are writable by both their owner and their group.

$ find . -perm -220

$ find . -perm -g+w,u+w

Both these commands do the same thing.

• A more elaborate search on permissions.

$ find . -perm -444 -perm /222 \! -perm /111

$ find . -perm -a+r -perm /a+w \! -perm /a+x

These two commands both search for files that are readable for everybody (-perm -444 or -perm
-a+r), have at least one write bit set (-perm /222 or -perm /a+w) but are not executable for any-
body (! -perm /111 or ! -perm /a+x respectively).
Pruning - omitting files and subdirectories
• Copy the contents of /source-dir to /dest-dir, but omit files and directories named .snapshot (and
anything in them). It also omits files or directories whose name ends in ‘~’, but not their contents.

$ cd /source-dir
$ find . -name .snapshot -prune -o \( \! -name '*˜' -print0 \) \
| cpio -pmd0 /dest-dir

The construct -prune -o \( ... -print0 \) is quite common. The idea here is that the expression
before -prune matches things which are to be pruned. However, the -prune action itself returns
true, so the following -o ensures that the right hand side is evaluated only for those directories
which didn’t get pruned (the contents of the pruned directories are not even visited, so their con-
tents are irrelevant). The expression on the right hand side of the -o is in parentheses only for
clarity. It emphasises that the -print0 action takes place only for things that didn’t have -prune
applied to them. Because the default ‘and’ condition between tests binds more tightly than -o,
this is the default anyway, but the parentheses help to show what is going on.
• Given the following directory of projects and their associated SCM administrative directories, per-
form an efficient search for the projects’ roots:

$ find repo/ \
\( -exec test -d '{}/.svn' \; \
-or -exec test -d '{}/.git' \; \
-or -exec test -d '{}/CVS' \; \
\) -print -prune

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Sample output:

repo/project1/CVS
repo/gnu/project2/.svn
repo/gnu/project3/.svn
repo/gnu/project3/src/.svn
repo/project4/.git

In this example, -prune prevents unnecessary descent into directories that have already been dis-
covered (for example we do not search project3/src because we already found project3/.svn), but
ensures sibling directories ( project2 and project3) are found.
Other useful examples
• Search for several file types.

$ find /tmp -type f,d,l

Search for files, directories, and symbolic links in the directory /tmp passing these types as a
comma-separated list (GNU extension), which is otherwise equivalent to the longer, yet more
portable:

$ find /tmp \( -type f -o -type d -o -type l \)

• Search for files with the particular name needle and stop immediately when we find the first one.

$ find / -name needle -print -quit

• Demonstrate the interpretation of the %f and %h format directives of the -printf action for some
corner-cases. Here is an example including some output.

$ find . .. / /tmp /tmp/TRACE compile compile/64/tests/find -maxdepth 0 -printf ’[%h][%f]\n’

[.][.]
[.][..]
[][/]
[][tmp]
[/tmp][TRACE]
[.][compile]
[compile/64/tests][find]

EXIT STATUS
find exits with status 0 if all files are processed successfully, greater than 0 if errors occur. This is deliber-
ately a very broad description, but if the return value is non-zero, you should not rely on the correctness of
the results of find.

When some error occurs, find may stop immediately, without completing all the actions specified. For ex-
ample, some starting points may not have been examined or some pending program invocations for
-exec ... {} + or -execdir ... {} + may not have been performed.
HISTORY
A find program appeared in Version 5 Unix as part of the Programmer’s Workbench project and was writ-
ten by Dick Haight. Doug McIlroy’s A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Program-
mer’s Manual, 1971-1986 provides some additional details; you can read it on-line at <https://www.cs.dart-
mouth.edu/˜doug/reader.pdf>.

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GNU find was originally written by Eric Decker, with enhancements by David MacKenzie, Jay Plett, and
Tim Wood. The idea for find -print0 and xargs -0 came from Dan Bernstein.
COMPATIBILITY
As of findutils-4.2.2, shell metacharacters (‘*’, ‘?’ or ‘[]’ for example) used in filename patterns match a
leading ‘.’, because IEEE POSIX interpretation 126 requires this.
As of findutils-4.3.3, -perm /000 now matches all files instead of none.
Nanosecond-resolution timestamps were implemented in findutils-4.3.3.
As of findutils-4.3.11, the -delete action sets find’s exit status to a nonzero value when it fails. However,
find will not exit immediately. Previously, find’s exit status was unaffected by the failure of -delete.
Feature Added in Also occurs in
-files0-from 4.9.0
-newerXY 4.3.3 BSD
-D 4.3.1
-O 4.3.1
-readable 4.3.0
-writable 4.3.0
-executable 4.3.0
-regextype 4.2.24
-exec ... + 4.2.12 POSIX
-execdir 4.2.12 BSD
-okdir 4.2.12
-samefile 4.2.11
-H 4.2.5 POSIX
-L 4.2.5 POSIX
-P 4.2.5 BSD
-delete 4.2.3
-quit 4.2.3
-d 4.2.3 BSD
-wholename 4.2.0
-iwholename 4.2.0
-ignore_readdir_race 4.2.0
-fls 4.0
-ilname 3.8
-iname 3.8
-ipath 3.8
-iregex 3.8
The syntax -perm +MODE was removed in findutils-4.5.12, in favour of -perm /MODE. The +MODE
syntax had been deprecated since findutils-4.2.21 which was released in 2005.
NON-BUGS
Operator precedence surprises
The command find . -name afile -o -name bfile -print will never print afile because this is actually
equivalent to find . -name afile -o \( -name bfile -a -print \). Remember that the precedence of -a is
higher than that of -o and when there is no operator specified between tests, -a is assumed.
“paths must precede expression” error message
$ find . -name *.c -print
find: paths must precede expression
find: possible unquoted pattern after predicate ‘-name’?
This happens when the shell could expand the pattern *.c to more than one file name existing in the current
directory, and passing the resulting file names in the command line to find like this:
find . -name frcode.c locate.c word_io.c -print
That command is of course not going to work, because the -name predicate allows exactly only one pattern

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as argument. Instead of doing things this way, you should enclose the pattern in quotes or escape the wild-
card, thus allowing find to use the pattern with the wildcard during the search for file name matching in-
stead of file names expanded by the parent shell:
$ find . -name '*.c' -print
$ find . -name \*.c -print
BUGS
There are security problems inherent in the behaviour that the POSIX standard specifies for find, which
therefore cannot be fixed. For example, the -exec action is inherently insecure, and -execdir should be
used instead.
The environment variable LC_COLLATE has no effect on the -ok action.
REPORTING BUGS
GNU findutils online help: <https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/#get-help>
Report any translation bugs to <https://translationproject.org/team/>
Report any other issue via the form at the GNU Savannah bug tracker:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils>
General topics about the GNU findutils package are discussed at the bug-findutils mailing list:
<https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils>
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 1990–2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
<https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by law.
SEE ALSO
chmod(1), locate(1), ls(1), updatedb(1), xargs(1), lstat(2), stat(2), ctime(3) fnmatch(3), printf(3), strf-
time(3), locatedb(5), regex(7)
Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/find>
or available locally via: info find

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