The find program is a directory search utility on Unix-like platforms. It searches through one or more directory trees of a filesystem, locating files based on some user-specified criteria. By default, find returns all files below the current working directory. Further, find allows the user to specify an action to be taken on each matched file. Thus, it is an extremely powerful program for applying actions to many files. It also supports regex matching.

The related, locate programs, use a database of indexed files obtained through find (updated at regular intervals, typically by cron job) to provide a faster method of searching the entire filesystem for files by name. This sacrifices overall efficiency (because filesystems are regularly interrogated even when no users needs information)and absolute accuracy (since the database is not updated in real time) for significant speed improvements (particularly on very large filesystems). On fast systems with small drives, locate is not necessary or desirable.

Find syntax

find 1 2 3 4 5

At least one path must precede the expression. Find is capable of interpreting wildcards internally and commands must be constructed carefully in order to control shell globbing.

Expression elements are whitespace-separated and evaluated from left to right. They can contain logical elements such as AND (-a) and OR (-o) as well as more complex predicates.

The GNU find has a large number of additional features not specified by POSIX.

POSIX protection from infinite output

Real-world filesystems often contain looped structures created through the use of hard or soft links. The POSIX standard requires that

From current directory

This searches in the current directory (represented by a period) and below it, for files and directories with names starting with my. The quotes avoid the shell expansion - without them the shell would replace my* with the list of files whose names begin with my in the current directory. In newer versions of the program, the directory may be omitted, and it will imply the current directory.

Files only

This limits the results of the above search to only regular files, therefore excluding directories, special files, pipes, symbolic links, etc. my* is enclosed in quotes as otherwise the shell would replace it with the list of files in the current directory starting with my...

Commands

The previous examples created listings of results because, by default, find executes the '-print' action. (Note that early versions of the find command had no default action at all; therefore the resulting list of files would be discarded, to the bewilderment of users.)