Find And Locate Your Files

How do search for files or directories in your file system? Well, you could use the find command. You could also use the locate command.

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[jdjones]

I love how you get straight to useful content.

[torspedia]

“Read the man page for find”
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“You’re not gonna want to read that gigantic novel of a man page...”

🤣

[lawrencedoliveiro]

8:07 Just checked the man page, and “+” means “greater than”, not “at least”. Similarly “-” means “less than”, not “at most”. Also k is kibibytes, not kilobytes, and M is mebibytes, not megabytes. And the sizes are rounded to the specified unit. Thus, “-10M” will only match files up to 9 × 1048576 = 9437184 bytes in size, not 10 × 1048576 - 1 = 10485759 bytes as you might have been expecting.

[AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Derek. These great CLI tools, including man pages are why I have no problem with those who insist on saying "Gnu-Linux". I pronounce the "Gnu" silently but I do always remember it. And always have time for material on the original Unix toolset.

[NapanTR]

locate - searches a pre-made files database of the filesystem (hence updatedb to update the database beforehand)


find - makes an actual live search on the filesystem (slow on big harddrives)

[evgeniyvalchev]

Very good tutorial about FISH. Thank You!

[lawrencedoliveiro]

One common idiom is feeding a list of files from find to some other command using xargs:


find «criteria» -print | xargs «cmd»



When feeding file names to another shell command, beware of shell-specials, for example spaces in filenames. Don’t forget you can also have newlines in filenames. The GNU versions of find and xargs have the option to use nulls as pathname separators, which avoids this problem:

find «criteria» -print0 | xargs -0 «cmd»

[ThomG]

Hello from France !!! Thanks for your amazing videos Derek ! Keep this great work ! btw, I use Arch (... from Manjaro)

[richardravich]

Derek, updatedb is usually automatically updated with a cron job on a daily basis.

[annielam]

This reminds me of Computer Basics (Chapter 6: Finding Files, Pages 153-180).

[encapsulatio]

What is the equivalent on Linux distros for the software you can install on Windows called "Everything", which is the ultimate instantaneous file search app?

[OmarAhmed-ehks]

What is the fish theme and color scheme you're using ?

[BrucesWorldofStuff]

Wow! Now I can locate or find all those Awesome files I can't find... What a relief.... Thanks DT
LLAP

[grimfistgaming]

Hey Derek, the find manpage is a perfect example why manpages suck. Take a look at tldr

[hendrix]

'find' is good to know but I prefer more minimal syntax of 'fd'

[urugulu]

hey derek i have been following the channel for a while and i see that you have an opinion on many programs that are out there (various terminals, filemanagers, mediaplayers, texteditors...). so have you heard of emelfm2 what are your thoughts on it or would you try it some day?

[Tara_Li]

Finding duplicate files is easy - and there's several apps for that. But I'm looking for an app or script that will sort things in such a way that any pairs of directories with a large number of identical files are easily identified. Say I've got a directory of music, and an album got located in a number of places - but some copies of the album have extra tracks that the others don't (Japan release vs. US release, or some such...)

[urugulu]

usually what i do is execute a command afterward like find all ogg files and convert them to mp3 with ffmpeg. but for that i have a script cause i dont memorize that command...

[lawrencedoliveiro]

2:09 And you can do a case-insensitive search with -iname instead of -name. Useful if you have files transferred from other systems that end up with uppercase names (e.g. .TXT instead of .txt).

[bendover]

A faster way to find insecure files in your system:
$ insecure='-delete'; sudo find / $insecure