Find cheatsheet

Basics

Find files with specific extension in current directory

find . -type f -name '*.txt'

Find directories

find . -type d

Find empty files

find . -type f -empty

Find files larger than 1 megabyte

find . -type f -size +1M

Find files smaller than 10 megabytes

find . -type f -size -10M

Find files with exact size of 2004 bytes

find . -type f -size 2004c

Size:

  • k kilobytes (1024 bytes)
  • M megabytes (1024 kilobytes)
  • G gigabytes (1024 megabytes)
  • T terabytes (1024 gigabytes)

Actions

Execute command on each file found

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec wc -l {} \;

Remove empty directories

find . -type d -empty -delete

Find and delete empty files

find . -empty -type f -delete

File Permissions and ownership

Find files owned by current user

find / -type f -user $USER

Find files not owned by current user

find . -type f -not -user $USER

Find files writable by current user (not owned by the user)

find / -writable -not -user $(id -un) \( -type d -or -type f \) -not -path "/proc/*" -not -path "/sys/" 2>/dev/null

Find files with SUID bit set

find / -type f -user root -perm -4000 -print
find / -type f -perm -u=s  2>/dev/null

Find files with SGID set

find / -type f -group root -perm -2000 -print

Find both SUID and SGID files

find / -type f -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 -print