Zola 2015-01-30T00:00:00+00:00 https://www.fullstackstanley.com/tags/unix/atom.xml 2015-01-30T00:00:00+00:00 2015-01-30T00:00:00+00:00 https://www.fullstackstanley.com/articles/unix-commands-find/ <p>After watching one of Gary Bernhardt’s Destroy All Software screencasts I thought I’d take some of his advice and learn about some basic Unix commands. I’m going to start with <code>find</code>.</p> <p>This post will be a small collection of useful commands I’ve found.</p> <span id="continue-reading"></span><h2 id="basic-directory-searching">Basic directory searching</h2> <p><code>find .</code> - Searching the current directory recursively.</p> <p><code>find ..</code> - Search from the parent directory.</p> <p><code>find $HOME</code> or <code>find ~</code> - Search your user directory</p> <p><code>find $HOME/projects/*.js</code> - Search for directories and files in your projects directory that end with <code>.js</code> - Not recursive.</p> <p><code>find $HOME/projects -name *.js</code> Search for .js files in your projects directory - recursive.</p> <h2 id="print-types">Print types</h2> <p><code>find . -print0</code> - Print the full filename followed by a null character instead of a newline. Best used with files that have multiline filenames.</p> <p><code>find . -printf</code> - for formatting output.</p> <p>Example: Showing filename and access</p> <p><code>find . -name *.js -printf &quot;%p %M\n”</code></p> <p>You can use numbers between %<char> (directives) to align text evenly. <code>%100p</code> will right align the filename for 100 characters. <code>%-100p</code> will left align for the same.</p> <p>Note that this doesn’t work natively on Macs. Instead, you have two options:</p> <ul> <li> <p>pipe to xargs like so: <code>find . -name *.js -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f &quot;%p %k KB”</code> (As found from <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/752818/why-does-macs-find-not-have-the-option-printf">Stackoverflow</a>.</p> </li> <li> <p>Install Findutils. If you use Homebrew you can run <code>brew install findutils</code>. Note that to use find this way you need to run <code>gfind</code>.</p> </li> </ul> <h3 id="fprint">fprint</h3> <p>Puts the results into a file. This also requires findutils if you’re on a Mac.</p> <p><code>find . -name *.js -fprint all_files.txt</code></p> <h2 id="symbolic-links">Symbolic links</h2> <p><code>find -P .</code> never follow symbolic links</p> <p><code>find -L .</code> follow symbolic links</p> <p><code>find -H .</code> don’t follow except when processing command line arguments</p> <h2 id="filter-by-time">Filter by time</h2> <p><code>find . -mmin n</code> modified n minutes ago</p> <p><code>find . -mtime n</code> modified n*24 hours ago.</p> <p><code>find . -newer ./composer.json</code> find files modified after composer.json</p> <h2 id="other-filters">Other filters</h2> <p><code>find . -size n[cwbkMG]</code> find files that use n units of space. where c = bytes, k = kilobytes, M = megabytes, G = gigabytes</p> <p><code>find . -maxdepth 1</code> - Only go one directory deep.</p> <p><code>find . -mindepth 1</code> - Ignore the first directory</p> <h2 id="actions">Actions</h2> <h3 id="delete">Delete</h3> <p><code>find . -delete</code> - delete files in directory</p> <p>Example - deleting all .js files.</p> <p><code>find . -name *.js -delete</code></p> <h3 id="exec">Exec</h3> <p>Removing all .bak files:</p> <p><code>find . -name \*.bak -exec rm {} \;</code></p> <p>The curly braces will get replaced with each filename that's found.</p> <p>As seen <a href="http://nixcraft.com/showthread.php/16297-find-exec-bash-example">here</a>.</p> <h2 id="windows-alternative-to-find">Windows alternative to find</h2> <p>For powershell use <code>Find-ChildItem</code>. <a href="http://superuser.com/questions/401495/equivalent-of-unix-find-command-on-windows">Read more here</a></p> <h2 id="useful-resources">Useful resources</h2> <ul> <li> <p><a href="http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?find">find documentation</a></p> </li> <li> <p><a href="http://linux.die.net/man/3/printf">printf documentation</a></p> </li> </ul>