There are so many little things to remember in this command that I always have to lookup what switches to use. So here are a few ways of using find

To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in current directory and its sub-directories:

find . -mtime -1 -print

Flag -mtime -1 option tells find command to look for files modified in the last day (24 hours). Flag -print option will cause find command to print the files’ location. -print can be replaced with -ls if you want a directory-listing-type response.

To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in a particular specific directory and its sub-directories:

find /directory_path -mtime -1 -print

The command is basically the same with the earlier command, just that now you no need to cd (change directory) to the directory you want to search.

To find all files with regular file types only, and modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in current directory and its sub-directories:

find /directory_path -type f -mtime -1 -print

To find all files that are modified today only (since start of day only, i.e. 12 am), in current directory and its sub-directories:

touch -t `date +%m%d0000` /tmp/$$  
find /tmefndr/oravl01 -type f -newer /tmp/$$  
rm /tmp/$$

The first command can be modified to specify other date and time, so that the commands will return all files that have changed since that particular date and time.

Find a file or directory

find . -name TEMP -print  
# or  
find . -name TEMP -exec echo {} \;

Find core files in this directory tree and remove them

find . -name "core" -exec rm -f {} \;

Find junk directories and remove their contents recursively

find . -name "junk" -exec rm -rf {} \;

Find a pattern in a file using the recursive grep (ignore case)

find . -type f xargs grep -i MYPATTERN

Find files modified in the past 7 days

find . -mtime -7 -type f

Find files owned by a particular user

find . -user esofthub

Find all your writable directories and list them

find . -perm -0777 -type d -ls  
# or  
find . -type d -perm 777 -print

Find all your writable files and list them

find . -perm -0777 -type f -ls  
# or  
find . -type f -perm 777 -print

Find large file sizes and list them

find . -type f -size +1000 -lsor  
# or
find . -type f -size +1000 -print

Find how many directories are in a path (counts current directory)

find . -type d -exec basename {} \; wc -l  
53

Find how many files are in a path

find . -type f -exec basename {} \; wc -l  
120

Find all my pipe files and change their permissions to all writable

find . -name "pipe*" -exec chmod 666 {} \;

Find files that were modified 7 days ago and archive

find . -type f -mtime 7 xargs tar -cvf `date '+%d%m%Y'_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified more than 7 days ago and archive

find . -type f -mtime +7 xargs tar -cvf `date '+%d%m%Y'_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified less than 7 days ago and archive

find . -type f -mtime -7 xargs tar -cvf `date '+%d%m%Y'_archive.tar`

Find files that were modified more than 7 days ago but less than 14 days ago and archive

find . -type f -mtime +7 -mtime -14 xargs tar -cvf `date '+%d%m%Y'_archive.tar`

Find files in two different directories having the “test” string and list them

find esofthub esoft -name "*test*" -type f -ls

Find files in two different directories having the “test” string and list them

find esofthub esoft -name "*test*" -type f -ls

Find files in two different directories having the “test” string and count them

find esofthub esoft -name "*test*" -type f -ls wc -l  
12

Find files and directories newer than CompareFile

find . -newer CompareFile -print

Find files and directories older than CompareFile

find . ! -newer CompareFile -print

Find files and directories but don’t traverse a particular directory

find . -name RAID -prune -o -print

Find all the files in the current directory

find * -type f -print -o -type d -prune

Find an inode and remove

find . -inum 968746 -exec rm -i {} \;

Avoid using “-exec {}”, as it will fork a child process for every file, wasting memory and CPU in the process. Use xargs, which will celeverly fit as many arguments as possible to feed to a command, and split up the number of arguments into chunks as necessary:

find . -depth -name "blabla*" -type f xargs rm -f

Also, be as precise as possible when searching for files, as this directly affects how long one has to wait for results to come back. Most of the stuff actually only manipulates the parser rather than what is actually being searched for, but even there, we can squeeze some performance gains, for example:

use “-depth” when looking for ordinary files and symollic links, as “-depth” will show them before directories

use “-depth -type f” when looking for ordinary file(s), as this speeds up the parsing and the search significantly:

find . -depth -type f -print ...

use “-mount” as the first argument when you know that you only want to search the current filesystem, and

use “-local” when you want to filter out the results from remote filesystems.

Note that “-local” won’t actually cause find not to search remote file systems — this is one of the options that affects parsing of the results, not the actual process of locating files; for not spanning remote filesystems, use “-mount” instead:

find / -mount -depth \( -type f -o -type l \) -print ...