

Linux Find Command Examples - mlLK
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/03/15-practical-linux-find-command-examples/

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philh
A mention of xargs might be worth slipping into this. A lot of the time it
doesn't really matter whether you use that or -exec, but it's faster on large
lists of files. And some commands (grep) act differently if there are multiple
files specified as input.

~~~
noss
xargs was my first thought as well. I think I type in this line almost daily
(why have i not made an alias already?):

find . -type f | xargs grep needle

gnu find and xargs have the -print0 and -0 arguments for piping nul terminated
filenames, so special chars in file names wont bite you.

~~~
kree10
I used to use the find | xargs grep idiom a lot too until I installed ack (
<http://betterthangrep.com/> ).

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jcsalterego
Reading this article I realized I always put `find .`, i.e. explicitly
specifying the current directory. I guess this is like saying `ls .` all the
time, but oh well.

Sometimes I find that I need to chain a few actions for my search results that
aren't possible with multiple -execs, so I employ the shell script loop:

    
    
      for js in `find . -name '*.js'`; do
        dir=`dirname $js`;
        cd $dir && make;
        java -jar jsmin.jar "$i";
      done;
    

Unfortunately if you've got spaces in your filenames, this will throw off
/bin/sh and you have to specify delimiters or work around that.

Lastly, I've found with find that if you have a n-sized conditional where n >
1 _and_ an -exec, you'll want to use escaped parentheses or otherwise the
conditionals won't evaluate properly.

Edits: addressing formatting woes.

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antirez
I always use it in the form:

    
    
      find . -iname '*.someextension' -exec ls -l {} \;
    

{} gets expanded to the matching file names. Of course ls -l is just an
example of command to run against the file name.

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williebee
sudo find / -size +1G -exec ls -lah '{}' \; | awk '{print $8" : "$5}' | tee
files_over_1G.txt ### This I use alot.

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piramida
man find expanded into article? nice.

