Finding files

find walks a directory tree and tests each entry against conditions you provide. It can find by name, type, size, age, owner and more.

find /path -name "*.log"find /path -iname "readme*"find . -type f -name "*.txt"find . -type d -name "cache"find . -type f -size +100Mfind . -type f -mtime -7find . -maxdepth 2 -type f

-name is case-sensitive and -iname is case-insensitive. -type f limits results to files and -type d to directories. -size +100M means larger than 100 MiB. -mtime -7 selects files modified less than seven 24-hour periods ago. -maxdepth limits how deeply find descends.

find can perform an action on matches:

find . -type f -name "*.tmp" -printfind . -type f -name "*.tmp" -deletefind . -type f -name "*.log" -exec gzip {} \;

-delete permanently removes matches, so run the same expression with -print first. With -exec, {} represents each matching path and \; terminates the action.

locate filename is faster for simple name searches because it uses a database, but results can be stale. Refresh it with sudo updatedb where the plocate or mlocate package is installed.