Command to find any file in linux

How can I find a specific file from a Linux terminal?

I am trying to find where index.html is located on my linux server, and was wondering if there was a command to do that. Very new to linux and appreciate any help I can get.

Searching from / would take a few days to complete. And spit out a bunch of (non-critical) errors for certain types of files while searching. Not the most efficient.

Several years later, Googling «find file in linux» gives this as a top 10 result. I’m sure glad the question was asked and answered.

6 Answers 6

Find from root path find / -name «index.html»

Find from current path find . -name «index.html»

The below line of code would do it for you.

However, on most Linux servers, your files will be located in /var/www or in your user directory folder /home/(user) depending on how you have it set up. If you’re using a control panel, most likely it’ll be under your user folder.

Ah, liked stated below, the find program might take a while to complete. I’m not aware of any other option.

update db locate index.html 

Replace /var with your best guess as to the directory it is in but avoid starting from /

All other answers suggest using find (well, this answer also suggests using find but only after locate ), however, after several months of using find I realise locate is more convenient indeed! By the way, what is update db ? Do I need it?

@shintaroid locate does not actually search on your files system for a given file. What it does is it caches the information about the files into a database which is refreshed by a job on a given time interval. So what updatedb does is just to update the database manually.

Solution: Use unix command find

The find utility recursively descends the directory tree for each path listed, evaluating an expression (composed of the ‘primaries’ and ‘operands’) in terms of each file in the tree.

• You can make the find action be more efficient and smart by controlling it with regular expressions queries, file types, size thresholds, depths dimensions in subtree, groups, ownership, timestamps , modification/creation date and more.
• In addition you can use operators and combine find requests such as or/not/and etc.

The Traditional Formula would be :

Easy Examples

1.Find by Name — Find all package.json from my current location subtree hierarchy.

2.Find by Name and Type — find all node_modules directories from ALL file system (starting from root hierarchy )

sudo find / -name "node_modules" -type d 

Complex Examples:

More Useful examples which can demonstrate the power of flag options and operators:

3.Regex and File Type — Find all javascript controllers variation names (using regex) javascript Files only in my app location.

find /user/dev/app -name "*contoller-*\.js" -type f 

-type f means file -name related to regular expression to any variation of controller string and dash with .js at the end

4.Depth — Find all routes patterns directories in app directory no more than 3 dimensions ( app/../../.. only and no more deeper)

find app -name "*route*" -type d -maxdepth 3 

-type d means directory -name related to regular expression to any variation of route string -maxdepth making the finder focusing on 3 subtree depth and no more /depth1/depth2/depth3 )

5.File Size , Ownership and OR Operator — Find all files with names ‘sample’ or ‘test’ under ownership of root user that greater than 1 Mega and less than 5 Mega.

find . \( -name "test" -or -name "sample" \) -user root -size +1M -size -5M 

-size threshold representing the range between more than (+) and less than (-) -user representing the file owner -or operator filters query for both regex matches

6.Empty Files — find all empty directories in file system

7.Time Access, Modification and creation of files — find all files that were created/modified/access in directory in 10 days

# creation (c) find /test -name "*.groovy" -ctime -10d # modification (m) find /test -name "*.java" -mtime -10d # access (a) find /test -name "*.js" -atime -10d 

8.Modification Size Filter — find all files that were modified exactly between a week ago to 3 weeks ago and less than 500kb and present their sizes as a list

find /test -name "*.java" -mtime -3w -mtime +1w -size -500k | xargs du -h 

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Find Files in Linux Using the Command Line

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When you have to find a file in Linux, it’s sometimes not as easy as finding a file in another operating system. This is especially true if you are running Linux without a graphical user interface and need to rely on the command line. This article covers the basics of how to find a file in Linux using the CLI. The find command in Linux is used to find a file (or files) by recursively filtering objects in the file system based on a simple conditional mechanism. You can use the find command to search for a file or directory on your file system. By using the -exec flag ( find -exec ), matches, which can be files, directories, symbolic links, system devices, etc., can be found and immediately processed within the same command.

Find a File in Linux by Name or Extension

Use find from the command line to locate a specific file by name or extension. The following example searches for *.err files in the /home/username/ directory and all sub-directories:

find /home/username/ -name "*.err" 

Using Common find Commands and Syntax to Find a File in Linux

find expressions take the following form:

find options starting/path expression 

• The options attribute will control the find process’s behavior and optimization method.
• The starting/path attribute will define the top-level directory where find begins filtering.
• The expression attribute controls the tests that search the directory hierarchy to produce output.

Consider the following example command:

find -O3 -L /var/www/ -name "*.html" 

This command enables the maximum optimization level (-O3) and allows find to follow symbolic links ( -L ). find searches the entire directory tree beneath /var/www/ for files that end with .html .

Basic Examples

Command	Description
find . -name testfile.txt	Find a file called testfile.txt in current and sub-directories.
find /home -name *.jpg	Find all .jpg files in the /home and sub-directories.
find . -type f -empty	Find an empty file within the current directory.
find /home -user exampleuser -mtime -7 -iname «.db»	Find all .db files (ignoring text case) modified in the last 7 days by a user named exampleuser.

Options and Optimization for find

The default configuration for find will ignore symbolic links (shortcut files). If you want find to follow and return symbolic links, you can add the -L option to the command, as shown in the example above.

find optimizes its filtering strategy to increase performance. Three user-selectable optimization levels are specified as -O1 , -O2 , and -O3 . The -O1 optimization is the default and forces find to filter based on filename before running all other tests.

Optimization at the -O2 level prioritizes file name filters, as in -O1 , and then runs all file-type filtering before proceeding with other more resource-intensive conditions. Level -O3 optimization allows find to perform the most severe optimization and reorders all tests based on their relative expense and the likelihood of their success.

Command	Description
-O1	(Default) filter based on file name first.
-O2	File name first, then file type.
-O3	Allow find to automatically re-order the search based on efficient use of resources and likelihood of success.
-maxdepth X	Search current directory as well as all sub-directories X levels deep.
-iname	Search without regard for text case.
-not	Return only results that do not match the test case.
-type f	Search for files.
-type d	Search for directories.

Find a File in Linux by Modification Time

The find command contains the ability to filter a directory hierarchy based on when the file was last modified:

find / -name "*conf" -mtime -7 find /home/exampleuser/ -name "*conf" -mtime -3 

The first command returns a list of all files in the entire file system that end with the characters conf and modified in the last seven days. The second command filters exampleuser user’s home directory for files with names that end with the characters conf and modified in the previous three days.

Use grep to Find a File in Linux Based on Content

The find command can only filter the directory hierarchy based on a file’s name and metadata. If you need to search based on the file’s content, use a tool like grep . Consider the following example:

find . -type f -exec grep "example" '<>' \; -print 

This searches every object in the current directory hierarchy ( . ) that is a file ( -type f ) and then runs the command grep «example» for every file that satisfies the conditions. The files that match are printed on the screen ( -print ). The curly braces ( <> ) are a placeholder for the find match results. The <> are enclosed in single quotes ( ‘ ) to avoid handing grep a malformed file name. The -exec command is terminated with a semicolon ( ; ), which should be escaped ( \; ) to avoid interpretation by the shell.

How to Find and Process a File in Linux

The -exec option runs commands against every object that matches the find expression. Consider the following example:

find . -name "rc.conf" -exec chmod o+r '<>' \; 

This filters every object in the current hierarchy ( . ) for files named rc.conf and runs the chmod o+r command to modify the find results’ file permissions.

The commands run with the -exec are executed in the find process’s root directory. Use -execdir to perform the specified command in the directory where the match resides. This may alleviate security concerns and produce a more desirable performance for some operations.

The -exec or -execdir options run without further prompts. If you prefer to be prompted before action is taken, replace -exec with -ok or -execdir with -okdir .

How to Find and Delete a File in Linux

To delete the files that end up matching your search, you can add -delete at the end of the expression. Do this only when you are positive the results will only match the files you wish to delete.

In the following example, find locates all files in the hierarchy starting at the current directory and fully recursing into the directory tree. In this example, find will delete all files that end with the characters .err :

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

This page was originally published on Monday, October 25, 2010.

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