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Find and search files.md

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Find and search files

Find

Find allows searching file names and directories under the current location

find <path> <settings>

Exclude specified pattern from find (eg. '*/\.git/*' for ignoring .git directories)

find <path> -not -path '<pattern>'

Show files that match the search criteria. The criteria can be a literal name or use wildcards * (wrap non-alphanumeric search criteria with quotes)

find . -name '<file-pattern>'

Find files (-type f), directories (-type d) or both

find <path> -type f
find <path> -type d
find <path>

Find files that match the file pattern and pass results to grep for searching file contents

find <path> -name '<file-pattern>' | xargs grep '<search-string>'

Find folders that are at a certain depth with the specified name

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -name '<search-string>'

Find files containing case insensitive <search-string> somewhere in their name

find <path> -iname '*<search-string>*' -type f

Find files under path that match file pattern excluding those inside specified directory

find <path> -type d -name <dir-name> -prune -false -o -name '<file-pattern>'

Find files under path that match file pattern excluding those inside multiple directories

find <path> -type d \( -name <dir1> -o -name <dir2> -o -name <dir3> \) -prune -false -o -name '<file-pattern>'

Notes on using find

  • -o is an OR operator
  • -prune excludes directory contents from search
  • -false when paired with prune removes pruned directories name appearing in output

Grep

Output files with content matching (-l) or not matching (-L) the search string

grep -l '<search-string>' <path>
grep -L '<search-string>' <path>

Search files recursively for search string below path location

grep -R '<search-string>' <path>

Search using extended regex (-E)

grep -E '<extended-regex>' <path>

Only show matches (-o) and do not print filenames (-h)

grep -ho '<search-string>' <path>

Advanced Grep Examples

Find files and print with sizes (Note: -printf is not POSIX and only available with GNU find)

find . -type f -printf '%6s %p\n'

Find files without *.orig and format output to include timestamp and path, then sort and grab the first 100

find . -type f -not -name '*.orig' -printf '%T+ %p\n' | sort | head -n 100

Show files with non-ascii characters

grep -P "[\x80-\xFF]" <files>

List all image filenames

ls | grep -iE ".*\.(gif|jpe?g|png|svg)"