FindEverything

This page was last updated on December 10, 2009.

Find Man Pages

• Find all man pages on foo:

zgrep -lw foo /usr/share/man/man1/*

Find Files By Age

• To find all files in a specific directory and any of its subdirectories that are older than 5 days:

find /path/to/directory -mtime +5

• To find all files in a specific directory and any of its subdirectories that are younger than 5 days:

find /path/to/directory -mtime -5

• Find all files in the current directory that were changed in the last one minute:

find . -mmin -1

• Find all files in a specific directory that have been created or added to subdirectories within the last 30 days and output the result to a text file:

find /path/to/directory -type f -mtime -30 -exec ls {} \; > filename.txt

Find Files By Name

• Find a file named foo:

locate foo

• The locate database is updated daily, but you can manually update it to catch recent changes with this command:

sudo updatedb

• Find all files named foo in a specific directory:

find /path/to/directory -name foo

• Find all files named foo in the current directory or any subdirectory tree:

find . -name foo

• Find all files named foo anywhere on the system:

find / -name foo

• Find all files whose names contain foo in a specific directory or any of its subdirectories:

find /path/to/directory -name "*foo*"

• Find all files that start with “foo” in a specific directory and all its subdirectories:

find /path/to/directory -iname foo*

Find Text Inside Files

• Find foo inside a specific file:

grep foo /path/to/file

Or:

cat /path/to/file | grep foo

• Find foo inside files in the current directory:

grep foo *

• Find foo inside files in the current directory and all subdirectories:

grep -r foo *

• Find foo inside files in the current directory and all subdirectories and display 15 lines of each result:

grep -rA 15 foo *

• Find foo inside files in the current directory, ignoring case and displaying the file name and line number of each result:

grep -in 'foo' *

• Find foo inside files in the current directory and all subdirectories, ignoring case and displaying only the names of the files that contain the search term:

grep -lir "foo" *

Obligatory Happy Ending

And they all lived happily ever after. The end.