Comments on: Mommy, I found it! — 15 Practical Linux Find Command Examples

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:50:22 +0000

I just came across a few articles on thegeekstuff.com, this being one of them. All I can say is, with writing like this there is hope that “normal people” will learn Linux. I’ve been in the industry for 7 years now (programming degree, etc) and this is some of the best, if not THE best written Linux quickref doco I’ve seen. Normal geeks (like me, as opposed to command line junkies) don’t read man pages because they’re written like scientific notation and contain virtually no examples. And if they do contain examples, they’re for rare cases that I virtually never use. This stuff is written well, to the point without lots of unnecessary verbiage, and has examples I can actually use. Great work guys!

By: Roberto

Roberto — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:06:50 +0000

Hello Ramesh! Many thanks for all this useful information. Im currently preparing to take my LPI-C 1 exam and while looking for more info in regard find command I found this web site. However, Im still have one initial question unaswered, what is the {} \; for?
{} is replaced by the current file name.( I got this)
then you have that backslash there and and semi-colon. I guessed this is related to the shell environment. Any chance that you or other internauts of this web site could explain a little bit further?
Kind Regards

By: debasis

debasis — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 09:39:32 +0000

can anyone please tell me
the use of “prune” in linux.
please explain it with example.

thanx alot

By: Vimal Roy

Vimal Roy — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:21:31 +0000

great cmds and example. thank u very much. need more……

By: shubham

shubham — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:24:05 +0000

Wonderful!!

By: Peng

Peng — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 04:22:42 +0000

hi ionh,

step 1, find all .txt files in the current directory and all of its subdirectories
$ find . -type f -name “*.txt”
step 2, pipe the result to grep, find those files containing ‘blob’
$ find . -type f -name “*.txt” | grep ‘blob’
step 3, add ‘-v’ (invert-match), find those files not containing ‘blob’
$ find . -type f -name “*.txt” | grep -v ‘blob’
step 4, pipe the file list to xargs, which breaks the list into sublists and deal with each one of them, note here we have to use ‘–target-directory’ to clarify our intention.
$ find . -type f -name “*.txt” | grep -v ‘blob’| xargs cp –target-directory=newDir

now you got all the files you want in the newDir. Mission completed! hope this helps.

Peng

note the ‘–target-directory’ above has 2 hyphen-minuses, instead of a dash, this website made it barely recognizable. you’ll know what i am talking about if you ‘cp –help’.

By: ionh

ionh — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:32:35 +0000

I’ve been trying to figure out how to “find” a set of files, with *both* inclusive and exclusive name filters, and then execute a command on the results – conceptually, something like:

find . -iname “*.txt” -exec grep -v blob ; cp {} MyDir \;

Of course, this is broken, but should indicate what i’m trying to do, namely,
find all “*.txt” files; reject any that are “*blob*”; and copy the rest to the MyDir directory.

Anyone know how to do this?

By: chamu

chamu — Tue, 03 May 2011 17:48:33 +0000

Hi Ramesh,
I like these commands and examples. Really of a help even for an experienced software developer who does not have hands on shell scripting. Keep up the servi

By: lokesh grover

lokesh grover — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:06:53 +0000

I m student of iacm for hardware networking . I m gain the extra knowldge of linux and networking .

By: Venkat Subramanian

Venkat Subramanian — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:30:20 +0000

Hey Ramesh !! You Rock man.. I love this website and ur free books.. Thanks for all the work you are doing!! I am proud of you!!