Find

Regular Expressions

find uses emacs regular expressions, which is annoying. I recommend filtering the results with egrep, e.g.:

find|egrep 'regex'
find|egrep -i 'regex' # case insensitive
find|egrep -v 'regex' # find the files that *don't* match

The find regular expressions are like POSIX 1003.2 regular expressions, except that the { } metacharacters cannot be used, and ( ) | are escaped (and other stuff)

Metacharacters:

. ^ $   \( \) \|   ? + *   [ ] [^ ]

Extensions:

find has non-greedy versions of ? * +

?? +? *?

find also has case-insensitive search with the -iregex argument

Examples

Find all subversion-related files:

$ find -regex ".*\.svn.*"

Find all movie files:

$ find -iregex ".*\.\(mpe?g\|avi\|mov\|qt\|wmv\|asf\)$"

Examples

find a file named "huba" in homedir and subdirs

$ find ~ -name huba

find a file named "HUBA" or "huga" or ... in homedir and subdirs

$ find ~ -iname "hu?a"

find all files changed in the last 10 minutes

$ find / -cmin -10

find all directories

$ find -type d

find all regular files

$ find -type f

find all dot-files (not directories) in homedir only

$ find ~ -name ".*" -maxdepth 1 -type f  (implicit '-and' between expressions...)

find and pretty-print all files modified today or owned by myself and modified a week ago

$ find / -mtime -1 -or \( -user schmid -mtime 7 \) -printf "%7AA d. %Ad. %Ab kl. %AX ændrede jeg filen '%f'.\n"

find all files called "*CVS/Root" and change "3.80" to "3.80:" in them - note: Don't try this at home!

$ for x in `find -regex ".*CVS/Root"`;do sed -e "s/3\.80/3\.80:/" $x >$x.sed;mv $x.sed $x; done