Powerful find Expressions

Searching by Size (-size)

Specify file size using suffixes:

• c: bytes
• k: Kilobytes
• M: Megabytes
• G: Gigabytes

Use + for greater than, - for less than.

bash

Find files larger than 50 Megabytes:

$ find /home -size +50M

Searching by Time (-mtime)

Find files based on their modification time (mtime). +N means older than N days; -N means newer than N days.

bash

Find files modified in the last 7 days:

$ find . -mtime -7

Executing Commands on Found Files (-exec)

This is where find gets powerful. You can run a command on every file it finds. The {} acts as a placeholder for the filename, and \; terminates the command.

bash

Find all '.tmp' files and delete them safely:

$ find . -name '*.tmp' -exec rm -i {} ;