Info Catalog find: Scope find: Introduction

find: Overview

 
 1.2 Overview
 ============
 
 The principal programs used for making lists of files that match given
 criteria and running commands on them are 'find', 'locate', and 'xargs'.
 An additional command, 'updatedb', is used by system administrators to
 create databases for 'locate' to use.
 
    'find' searches for files in a directory hierarchy and prints
 information about the files it found.  It is run like this:
 
      find [FILE...] [EXPRESSION]
 
 Here is a typical use of 'find'.  This example prints the names of all
 files in the directory tree rooted in '/usr/src' whose name ends with
 '.c' and that are larger than 100 KiB.
      find /usr/src -name '*.c' -size +100k -print
 
    Notice that the wildcard must be enclosed in quotes in order to
 protect it from expansion by the shell.
 
    'locate' searches special file name databases for file names that
 match patterns.  The system administrator runs the 'updatedb' program to
 create the databases.  'locate' is run like this:
 
      locate [OPTION...] PATTERN...
 
 This example prints the names of all files in the default file name
 database whose name ends with 'Makefile' or 'makefile'.  Which file
 names are stored in the database depends on how the system administrator
 ran 'updatedb'.
      locate '*[Mm]akefile'
 
    The name 'xargs', pronounced EX-args, means "combine arguments."
 'xargs' builds and executes command lines by gathering together
 arguments it reads on the standard input.  Most often, these arguments
 are lists of file names generated by 'find'.  'xargs' is run like this:
 
      xargs [OPTION...] [COMMAND [INITIAL-ARGUMENTS]]
 
 The following command searches the files listed in the file 'file-list'
 and prints all of the lines in them that contain the word 'typedef'.
      xargs grep typedef < file-list
 

Info Catalog find: Scope find: Introduction