Hello Linux/Unix lovers,

I never knew that find command can be so useful. I have collated some cool find command example which can always help you in your work stations.

I am sure you all know the format of find command.

Format: 

find path criteria action

Example

find . -name "*.log" -exec ls -l {} \;

1. Find all the log file inside a folder/subfolder and delete or archive them.

find . -name "*.log" -type f -exec rm {} \;

find . -name "*.log" -type f -exec gzip {} \;

2. Let's say you want to delete all txt files which are older than 60 days from /temp folder.

find /tmp -name "*.text" -type f -mtime +60 -exec rm -f {} \;

3. Now we want to delete/archive some set of files which are 3 months old and whose size is bigger than 1 mb.

find /path -name "*.log" -type f -mtime +90 -size +1024k -exec rm -f {} \;

4. Find out the total size of all log files in a folder which are 30 days older.

find /logs -name '*.log' -type f -mtime +30 -exec du -am {} \;

The above command will list files with their size in mb.

Now you can apply logic to add the first column values to get total size using awk.

find /logs -name '*.log' -type f -mtime +30 -exec du -am {} \; | awk '{ total += $1 }; END { print total }'

Using awk we added all the values in first column and print the total. 

Note:-

du -ak afile shows file size in KB

du -am afile shows file size in MB.

likewise du -ag afile shows file size in GB.

5. List the files' count in a directory which are any files but not log files(*.log).

find /path ! -name "*.log" -type f -exec ls -l {} \; | wc -l

6. List out all the directories in a folder recursively whose name is "archive"

find . -name "archive" -type d 

"." points to current directory.

7. Archive any files which are older than 2 days and but exclude the files which are already zipped, from /tmp folder.

find /tmp/ ! -name "*.zip" -type f -mtime +2 -exec gzip -vf {} \;

Here, gzip has below options:

-v -> archive in verbose mode.

-f -> if there is already a file with the name filename.gz, that will be replaced. 

8. Search for a particular pattern in all ARD file inside a folder which are older than 90 and get their occurrence count. Don't look into *.zip.gz files

find /path -name *.ARD" -type f ! -name "*.zip.gz" -mtime +90 -exec grep "pattern" {} \; | wc -l

I will keep this article updated with new stuff. If you like it share it!!