Linux Command “find” 101

It’s been a month i move back to Ubuntu as my primary OS. And i would like to write one of the most use command in Linux: “find”. This command is like a magic to search anything i want on my hard drive. I can find a text inside a file, or filter it for certain extension. I can search the files with latest modified time and also the file size.

List to use Linux command “find” that mostly used by me:

1. Find all PHP Files in a directory:

   find . -type f -name "*.php"

2. Find a file with a name:

   find /etc/ -type f -name "php.ini"

3. Find file with wrong permission (i use this because suPHP need file permission 755)

   find . -type f -perm 0777 
   #OR
   find . -type f -perm -o=w
   #And to change them to correct permission, i use this command:
   find . -type f -perm 0777 -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;
   find . -type d -perm 777 -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;
   

4. Find unnecessary files and remove them. (Use this with extreme cautious):

   find . -type f -name "*.cache" -exec rm -f {} \;
   #to remove empty files:
   find /tmp -type f -empty -exec rm -f {} \;
   

5. Find files by modified date:

   #this will find all PHP files modified yesterday
   find . -type f -name "*.php" -mtime -1
   #this will find all PHP files modified for the last 2 hours
   find . -type f -name "*.php" -mmin -120
   

6. Find files by the file size

   #Find zip files with more than 2MB
   find . -name "*.zip" -size +2M
   

7. Find a text in all files

   #this will find "die_dump" in all php files
   find . -name "*.php" -exec grep -in "die_dump" {} \; -print