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find(1) find(1) NAME find - find files SYNOPSIS /usr/bin/find [-H | -L] path... expression /usr/xpg4/bin/find [-H | -L] path... expression The find utility recursively descends the directory hierarchy for each path seeking files that match a Boolean expression written in the pri- maries given below. find is able to descend to arbitrary depths in a file hierarchy and does not fail due to path length limitations (unless a path operand specified by the application exceeds PATH_MAX requirements). The following options are supported: -H Causes the file information and file type evaluated for each symbolic link encountered on the command line to be those of the file referenced by the link, and not the link itself. If the referenced file does not exist, the file information and type is for the link itself. File information for all symbolic links not on the command line is that of the link itself. -L Causes the file information and file type evaluated for each symbolic link to be those of the file referenced by the link, and not the link itself. See NOTES. Specifying more than one of the mutually-exclusive options -H and -L is not considered an error. The last option specified determines the be- havior of the utility. The following operands are supported: path A path name of a starting point in the directory hier- archy. expression The first argument that starts with a -, or is a ! or a (, and all subsequent arguments are interpreted as an expression made up of the following primaries and oper- ators. In the descriptions, wherever n is used as a primary argument, it is interpreted as a decimal inte- ger optionally preceded by a plus (+) or minus (-) sign, as follows: +n more than n n exactly n -n less than n Expressions Valid expressions are: -acl True if the file have additional ACLs defined. -atime n True if the file was accessed n days ago. The access time of directories in path is changed by find itself. -cpio device Always true. Writes the current file on device in cpio format (5120-byte records). -ctime n True if the file's status was changed n days ago. -depth Always true. Causes descent of the directory hierarchy to be done so that all entries in a directory are acted on before the directory itself. This can be useful when find is used with cpio(1) to transfer files that are contained in directories without write permission. -exec command True if the executed command returns a zero value as exit status. The end of command must be punctuated by an escaped semicolon (;). A command argument {} is re- placed by the current path name. If the last argument to -exec is {} and you specify + rather than the semi- colon (;), the command is invoked fewer times, with {} replaced by groups of pathnames. -follow Always true. Causes symbolic links to be followed. When following symbolic links, find keeps track of the di- rectories visited so that it can detect infinite loops. For example, such a loop would occur if a symbolic link pointed to an ancestor. This expression should not be used with the -type l expression. See NOTES. -fstype type True if the filesystem to which the file belongs is of type type. -group gname True if the file belongs to the group gname. If gname is numeric and does not appear in the /etc/group file, or in the NIS/NIS+ tables, it is taken as a group ID. -inum n True if the file has inode number n. -links n True if the file has n links. -local True if the file system type is not a remote file sys- tem type as defined in the /etc/dfs/fstypes file. nfs is used as the default remote filesystem type if the /etc/dfs/fstypes file is not present. The -local option descends the hierarchy of non-local directories. See for an example of how to search for local files without descending. -ls Always true. Prints current path name together with its associated statistics. These include (respectively): o inode number o size in kilobytes (1024 bytes) o protection mode o number of hard links o user o group o size in bytes o modification time. If the file is a special file, the size field instead contains the major and minor device numbers. If the file is a symbolic link, the pathname of the linked-to file is printed preceded by `->'. The format is identical to that of ls -gilds (see ls(1B)). Formatting is done internally, without executing the ls program. -mount Always true. Restricts the search to the file system containing the directory specified. Does not list mount points to other file systems. -mtime n True if the file's data was modified n days ago. -name pattern True if pattern matches the current file name. Normal shell file name generation characters (see sh(1)) can be used. A backslash (\) is used as an escape character within the pattern. The pattern should be escaped or quoted when find is invoked from the shell. Unless the character '.' is explicitly specified in the beginning of pattern, a current file name begin- ning with '.' does not match pattern when using /usr/bin/find. /usr/xpg4/bin/find does not make this distinction; wildcard file name generation characters can match file names beginning with '.'. -ncpio device Always true. Writes the current file on device in cpio -c format (5120 byte records). -newer file True if the current file has been modified more re- cently than the argument file. -nogroup True if the file belongs to a group not in the /etc/group file, or in the NIS/NIS+ tables. -nouser True if the file belongs to a user not in the /etc/passwd file, or in the NIS/NIS+ tables. -ok command Like -exec, except that the generated command line is printed with a question mark first, and is executed only if the user responds by typing y. -perm [-]mode The mode argument is used to represent file mode bits. It is identical in format to the symbolic mode operand, symbolic_mode_list, described in chmod(1), and is in- terpreted as follows. To start, a template is assumed with all file mode bits cleared. An op symbol of: + Set the appropriate mode bits in the template - Clear the appropriate bits = Set the appropriate mode bits, without regard to the contents of the file mode creation mask of the process The op symbol of - cannot be the first character of mode, to avoid ambiguity with the optional leading hy- phen. Since the initial mode is all bits off, there are no symbolic modes that need to use - as the first char- acter. If the hyphen is omitted, the primary evaluates as true when the file permission bits exactly match the value of the resulting template. Otherwise, if mode is prefixed by a hyphen, the primary evaluates as true if at least all the bits in the re- sulting template are set in the file permission bits. -perm [-]onum True if the file permission flags exactly match the oc- tal number onum (see chmod(1)). If onum is prefixed by a minus sign (-), only the bits that are set in onum are compared with the file permission flags, and the expression evaluates true if they match. -print Always true. Causes the current path name to be printed. -prune Always yields true. Does not examine any directories or files in the directory structure below the pattern just matched. (See ). If -depth is specified, -prune has no effect. -size n[c] True if the file is n blocks long (512 bytes per block). If n is followed by a c, the size is in bytes. -type c True if the type of the file is c, where c is b, c, d, D, f, l, p, or s for block special file, character spe- cial file, directory, door, plain file, symbolic link, fifo (named pipe), or socket, respectively. -user uname True if the file belongs to the user uname. If uname is numeric and does not appear as a login name in the /etc/passwd file, or in the NIS/NIS+ tables, it is taken as a user ID. -xdev Same as the -mount primary. -xattr True if the file has extended attributes. Complex Expressions The primaries can be combined using the following operators (in order of decreasing precedence): 1) ( expression ) True if the parenthesized expression is true (parentheses are special to the shell and must be escaped). 2) ! expression The negation of a primary (! is the unary not operator). 3) expression [-a] expression Concatenation of primaries (the and op- eration is implied by the juxtaposition of two primaries). 4) expression -o expression Alternation of primaries (-o is the or operator). When you use find in conjunction with cpio, if you use the -L option with cpio then you must use the -follow expression with find and vice versa. Otherwise there are undesirable results. If no expression is present, -print is used as the expression. Other- wise, if the given expression does not contain any of the primaries -exec, -ok or -print, the given expression is effectively replaced by: ( given_expression ) -print The -user, -group, and -newer primaries each evaluate their respective arguments only once. Invocation of command specified by -exec or -ok does not affect subsequent primaries on the same file. See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of find when en- countering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2**31 bytes). Example 1: Writing Out the Hierarchy Directory The following commands are equivalent: example% find . example% find . -print They both write out the entire directory hierarchy from the current di- rectory. Example 2: Removing Files The following comand removes all files in your home directory named a.out or *.o that have not been accessed for a week: example% find $HOME \( -name a.out -o -name '*.o' \) \ -atime +7 -exec rm {} \; Example 3: Printing All File Names But Skipping SCCS Directories The following command recursively print all file names in the current directory and below, but skipping SCCS directories: example% find . -name SCCS -prune -o -print Example 4: Printing all file names and the SCCS directory name Recursively print all file names in the current directory and below, skipping the contents of SCCS directories, but printing out the SCCS directory name: example% find . -print -name SCCS -prune Example 5: Testing for the Newer File The following command is basically equivalent to the -nt extension to test(1): example$ if [ -n "$(find file1 -prune -newer file2)" ]; then printf %s\\n "file1 is newer than file2" Example 6: Selecting a File Using 24-hour Mode The descriptions of -atime, -ctime, and -mtime use the terminology n ``24-hour periods''. For example, a file accessed at 23:59 is selected by: example% find . -atime -1 print at 00:01 the next day (less than 24 hours later, not more than one day ago). The midnight boundary between days has no effect on the 24-hour calculation. Example 7: Printing Files Matching a User's Permission Mode The following command recursively print all file names whose permission mode exactly matches read, write, and execute access for user, and read and execute access for group and other: example% find . -perm u=rwx,g=rx,o=rx The above could alternatively be specified as follows: example% find . -perm a=rwx,g-w,o-w Example 8: Printing Files with Write Access for other The following command recursively print all file names whose permission includes, but is not limited to, write access for other: example% find . -perm -o+w Example 9: Printing Local Files without Descending Non-local Directo- ries example% find . ! -local -prune -o -print Example 10: Printing the Files in the Name Space Possessing Extended Attributes example% find . -xattr See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of find: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH. PATH Determine the location of the utility_name for the -exec and -ok primaries. The following exit values are returned: 0 All path operands were traversed successfully. >0 An error occurred. /etc/passwd Password file /etc/group Group file /etc/dfs/fstypes File that registers distributed file system packages See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |CSI |Enabled | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Interface Stability |Stable | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ chmod(1), cpio(1), ls(1B), sh(1), test(1), acl(2), stat(2), umask(2), attributes(5), environ(5), fsattr(5), largefile(5), standards(5) The following options are obsolete and will not be supported in future releases: -cpio device Always true. Writes the current file on device in cpio format (5120-byte records). -ncpio device Always true. Writes the current file on device in cpio -c format (5120-byte records). When using find to determine files modified within a range of time, use the -mtime argument before the -print argument. Otherwise, find gives all files. Some files that might be under the Solaris root file system are actu- ally mount points for virtual file systems, such as mntfs or namefs. When comparing against a ufs file system, such files are not selected if -mount or -xdev is specified in the find expression. Using the -L or -follow option is not recommended when descending a file-system hierarchy that is under the control of other users. In par- ticular, when using -exec, symbolic links can lead the find command out of the hierarchy in which it started. Using -type is not sufficient to restrict the type of files on which the -exec command operates, because there is an inherent race condition between the type-check performed by the find command and the time the executed command operates on the file argument. 15 July 2005 find(1)
NAME | SYNOPSIS
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