./_Man_Solaris_2.5_html/html1/find.1.html

Manual page for find(1)

find - find files

SYNOPSIS

find path...expression

AVAILABILITY

SUNWcsu

DESCRIPTION

The find command recursively descends the directory hierarchy for each path seeking files that match a Boolean expression written in the primaries given below.

find will be able to descend to arbitrary depths in a file hierarchy and will not fail due to path length limitations (unless a path operand specified by the application exceeds PATH_MAX requirements).

OPERANDS

The following operands are supported:

path: a path name of a starting point in the directory hierarchy.

The first argument that starts with a -, or is a ! or a (, and all subsequent arguments will be interpreted as an expression made up of the following primaries and operators. In the descriptions, wherever n is used as a primary argument, it will be interpreted as a decimal integer 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:

-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; write 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 replaced by the current path name.
-follow: Always true; causes symbolic links to be followed. When following symbolic links, find keeps track of the directories 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.
-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, 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 system 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.
-ls: Always true; prints current path name together with its associated statistics. These include (respectively):

inode number
size in kilobytes (1024 bytes)
protection mode
number of hard links
user
group
size in bytes
modification time.

If the file is a special file the size field will instead contain 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.1

Note: 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 may 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.

-ncpio device

Always true; write the current file on device in cpio -c format (5120 byte records).

-newer file

True if the current file has been modified more recently than the argument file.

-nogroup

True if the file belongs to a group not in the /etc/group file.

-nouser

True if the file belongs to a user not in the /etc/passwd file.

-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 will be identical in format to the <symbolicmode> operand described in chmod.1 and will be interpreted as follows. To start, a template will be assumed with all file mode bits cleared. An op symbol of:

+: will set the appropriate mode bits in the template;
-: will clear the appropriate bits;
=: will set the appropriate mode bits, without regard to the contents of process' file mode creation mask.

: The op symbol of - cannot be the first character of mode; this avoids ambiguity with the optional leading hyphen. Since the initial mode is all bits off, there are not any symbolic modes that need to use - as the first character.
: If the hyphen is omitted, the primary will evaluate 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 will evaluate as true if at least all the bits in the resulting template are set in the file permission bits.
-perm [-]onum: True if the file permission flags exactly match the octal 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. Do not examine any directories or files in the directory structure below the pattern just matched. See the examples, below.
-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, l, p, or f for block special file, character special file, directory, symbolic link, fifo (named pipe), or plain file, 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, it is taken as a user ID.
-xdev: Same as the -mount primary.

Complex Expressions

The primaries may 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 operation is implied by the juxtaposition of two primaries).
4) expression -o expression: Alternation of primaries (-o is the or operator).

Note: 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 will be undesirable results.

If no expression is present, -print will be used as the expression. Otherwise, if the given expression does not contain any of the primaries -exec, -ok or -print, the given expression will be effectively replaced by:

: ( given_expression ) -print

The -user, -group, and -newer primaries each will evaluate their respective arguments only once.

EXAMPLES

The following commands are equivalent:

example% find .
example% find . -print

They both write out the entire directory hierarchy from the current directory.

Remove 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 {} \;

Recursively print all file names in the current directory and below, but skipping SCCS directories:

: example% find . -name SCCS -prune -o -print

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

The following command is roughly 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"
fi

The descriptions of -atime, -ctime, and -mtime use the terminology n ``24-hour periods''. For example, a file accessed at 23:59 will be 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.

ENVIRONMENT

See environ.5 for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of find: LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

EXIT STATUS

The following exit values are returned:

0: All path operands were traversed successfully.
>0: An error occurred.

FILES

/etc/passwd: password file
/etc/group: group file
/etc/dfs/fstypes: file that registers distributed file system packages

WARNINGS

The following options are obsolete and will not be supported in future releases:

-cpio device: Always true; write the current file on device in cpio format (5120-byte records).
-ncpio device: Always true; write the current file on device in cpio -c format (5120 byte records).

NOTES

When using find to determine files modified within a range of time, one must use the ?time argument before the -print argument otherwise find will give all files.

Last modified 21/April/97