7 Uses of find Command in Linux

Find it and do what you want

Photo by 420BongHits on Wallhaven

It’s safe to say that the find command in Linux is one of the must-know operations for backend developers, unless you are using a Windows Server.

For technical interviews, it’s also a popular topic. Let’s see a real question:

If there is a directory called logs on your Linux server, how to delete the log files under it whose last access time was over one year ago? 🤔

This scenario is common, but surprisingly, not every developer can write the command clearly in an interview.

Answer: First of all, we need to use the cd command to enter the corresponding directory, and then, the command is as follows:

find . -type f -atime +365 -exec rm -rf {} \; 

If you don’t fully understand the above command yet, no worries at all. This article will introduce 7 practical uses of the find command and you’ll master it eventually. If you already knew it, reading this article will be a great recap for you.

0. Find Files by Names or Regular Expressions

Let’s start from the simplest usage. To search files by a specific name, the command is like the following:

find . -name test.txt