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Questions tagged [find]

search for files in a directory hierarchy

Find is used to look files in a directory hierarchy. You can refer to its manpage here.

Examples:

Look for all files on a server owned by user siegfried:

 find / -user siegfried

Find all files ending in php en remove them:

 find / *.php -exec rm '{}' \;
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Use 'find' to determine files modified yesterday

I'm sure this is an age old question with a simple answer, but I've tried every combination I know to try and haven't come up with anything. And searching Google is less than pleasant since searching this topic comes up with hundreds of way to "find…
Corey S.
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Deleting files in Linux

I need to find all files matching a certain criteria and delete them - here's a snippet: /var/www/somesite/releases/{many directories}/tmp/attachment_fu I'd like to find all files in any tmp/attachment_fu directory and delete them - the problem is…
user18816
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Why is my find -type d performing fstat on every file in a folder?

I'm running find . -type d on a rather large directory tree. I am only interested in finding directories within this tree, but when I ran an strace against the process to make sure it was doing what I expected it to be doing, I noticed that there…
Nathan
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List directories not containing a file which has a variable prefix

I'm checking the output from a script. In some cases the script has failed, and a certain file hasn't been produced. I want to check whether this file is present in a directory and if not, print the directory name. The directories look…
Conor
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How to list every file that is written to, on Linux?

What is the best way of getting a list of all files which have been written to, since power on? Is a simple find (with mtime) best for this, or are there other ways? (find won't list files which are written to, then deleted.) I'm using Ubuntu Linux…
fadedbee
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How to properly pipe find with grep and cp in this use case

I am interested in recursively grepping for a string in a directory for a pattern and then cp'ing the matching file to a destination directory. I thought I could do something like the following, but it doesn't seem to make sense with linux's find…
imaginative
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How to run a recursive chmod that stop at FileSystem Boundaries

I have a directory with lots of files and inside a mounted directory. var/ log/ nfs/ (a NFS remote directory) www/ How can I chmod/chown everyfiles inside that directory without changing nfs ones.
Natim
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find and remove duplicates filenames in directory hierarchy

#!/bin/sh LASTBASE="" find $1 -type f -print | rev | sort | rev | while read FILE do BASE=$(basename "$FILE") if [ "$BASE" = "$LASTBASE" ]; then rm "$FILE" LASTBASE="$BASE" done
stefcud
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`find` command not available in web host, how to implement a delete based on modification time using other commands?

I'm creating a simple datebase backup solution for a client using web hosting at DataFlame. The web hosting account provides access to cron but not a shell. I have a database backup script creating regular backups and I want to automatically remove…
CalumJEadie
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How to find any symbolic links that point outside a given folder tree?

I have a bunch of folders/files that are 10+ levels deep. How can I find any symbolic links that point outside this folder tree? I tried find -type l but this returns all soft links... even those whose destination is with in the folder…
nonot1
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sh script to remove just txt files using find and exec rm warns me of missing argument to exec

find /full/path/dir -name '*.txt' -exec /bin/rm {} \; Fine in a shell, but pop it in a sh script along with some similar lines, to get it to run nightly from a cronjob, and it reports: find: missing argument to `-exec' on everything. I've tried…
talkingnews
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List directories without a specific folder

I need some help constructing a directory listing using 'find'? An example directory structure looks something like this: / (root) - /foo - /folderA - /folderB - /bar - /folderA -/search - /folderB What I want to find is a list…
Derek Downey
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How to use find to replace several files of the same name

I have several files of the same name (say, somefile.php) scattered within several directories under /var/ If I want to replace all of them with a new version of somefile.php located in, say, /home/me/somefile.php ... how would I do that? Every…
Callmeed
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How to delete everything except .svn directories?

I have quite complex directory tree. There are many subdirectories, in those subdirectories beside other files and directories are ".svn" directories. Now, under linux I want to delete all files and directories except the .svn directories. I found…
Arek
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How do I find the total number of lines in a set of found files (using Linux command-line tools)?

I can find the number of lines of each file matching a particular pattern using (for example): $ find . -name "test.save*" -exec wc -l {} \; 673000 ./test.save8.txt 24000 ./from/test1/test.save3.txt 100 ./from/test1/test.save1.txt 513000…
Daryl Spitzer
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