Find examples

From man find:

The find utility recursively descends the directory tree for each path listed, evaluating an expression … in terms of each file in the tree.

Prerequisites

Given the following directory tree:

tree
.
├── file1.txt
├── file2.txt
├── folder
│   └── file3
└── tmp
    └── file4

2 directories, 4 files

To recreate the directory layout, run the command:

mkdir -p folder tmp && touch file1.txt file2.txt folder/file3 tmp/file4

To list all files and directories in your current working directory:

find .

Output:

.
./file2.txt
./file1.txt
./folder
./folder/file3
./tmp
./tmp/file4

To list all files and directories in folder:

find folder

Output:

folder
folder/file3

To list only files:

find . -type f

Output:

./file2.txt
./file1.txt
./folder/file3
./tmp/file4

To list only directories:

find . -type d

Output:

.
./folder
./tmp

To list all files in folder:

find folder -type -f

Output:

folder/file3

To list all files with the extension .txt:

find . -type f -name '*.txt'

Output:

./file2.txt
./file1.txt

Which is the same as:

find . -type f -name \*.txt

To list all files excluding those in tmp:

find . -type f ! -path './tmp/*'

Output:

./file2.txt
./file1.txt
./folder/file3

To list all files excluding those in folder and tmp:

find . -type f ! -path './tmp/*' ! -path './folder/*'

Output:

./file2.txt
./file1.txt

To test against multiple conditions:

find . -name '*.txt' -or -name '*tmp*'

Output:

./file2.txt
./file1.txt
./tmp

This is the same as:

find . -name '*.txt' -o -name '*tmp*'

The following test operators are available to be used:

To execute a command for each match:

find . -name '*.txt' -exec echo {} \;

Output:

./file2.txt
./file1.txt

The {} is the argument and \; is to ensure the semicolon is escaped.

This is the same as:

echo ./file2.txt && echo ./file1.txt

To execute a single command for all matches:

find . -name '*.txt' -exec echo {} +

Output:

./file2.txt ./file1.txt

This is the same as:

echo ./file2.txt ./file1.txt

Here’s an article with more usage examples of the find command.