find: Overview
1.2 Overview
============
The principal programs used for making lists of files that match given
criteria and running commands on them are 'find', 'locate', and 'xargs'.
An additional command, 'updatedb', is used by system administrators to
create databases for 'locate' to use.
'find' searches for files in a directory hierarchy and prints
information about the files it found. It is run like this:
find [FILE...] [EXPRESSION]
Here is a typical use of 'find'. This example prints the names of all
files in the directory tree rooted in '/usr/src' whose name ends with
'.c' and that are larger than 100 KiB.
find /usr/src -name '*.c' -size +100k -print
Notice that the wildcard must be enclosed in quotes in order to
protect it from expansion by the shell.
'locate' searches special file name databases for file names that
match patterns. The system administrator runs the 'updatedb' program to
create the databases. 'locate' is run like this:
locate [OPTION...] PATTERN...
This example prints the names of all files in the default file name
database whose name ends with 'Makefile' or 'makefile'. Which file
names are stored in the database depends on how the system administrator
ran 'updatedb'.
locate '*[Mm]akefile'
The name 'xargs', pronounced EX-args, means "combine arguments."
'xargs' builds and executes command lines by gathering together
arguments it reads on the standard input. Most often, these arguments
are lists of file names generated by 'find'. 'xargs' is run like this:
xargs [OPTION...] [COMMAND [INITIAL-ARGUMENTS]]
The following command searches the files listed in the file 'file-list'
and prints all of the lines in them that contain the word 'typedef'.
xargs grep typedef < file-list