Find (Unix)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Find" Unix – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In Unix-like operating systems, find is a command-line utility that locates files based on some user-specified criteria and either prints the pathname of each matched object or, if another action is requested, performs that action on each matched object.

It initiates a search from a desired starting location and then recursively traverses the nodes (directories) of a hierarchical structure (typically a tree). find can traverse and search through different file systems of partitions belonging to one or more storage devices mounted under the starting directory.^[1]

The possible search criteria include a pattern to match against the filename or a time range to match against the modification time or access time of the file. By default, find returns a list of all files below the current working directory, although users can limit the search to any desired maximum number of levels under the starting directory.

The related locate programs use a database of indexed files obtained through find (updated at regular intervals, typically by cron job) to provide a faster method of searching the entire file system for files by name.