

Īt least one path must precede the expression.

A common extension is the -P flag, for explicitly disabling symlink following. These flags are specified in the POSIX standard for find. The -H flag will only follow symbolic links while processing the command line arguments. The -L flag will cause the find command to follow symbolic links. The default behaviour is never to follow symbolic links. The two options control how the find command should treat symbolic links. The find command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system. It was later enhanced by David MacKenzie, Jay Plett, and Tim Wood. The GNU find implementation was originally written by Eric Decker. 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.įind appeared in Version 5 Unix as part of the Programmer's Workbench project, and was written by Dick Haight alongside cpio, which were designed to be used together. 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 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. find can traverse and search through different file systems of partitions belonging to one or more storage devices mounted under the starting directory. It initiates a search from a desired starting location and then recursively traverses the nodes (directories) of a hierarchical structure (typically a tree). In Unix-like and some other 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. JSTOR ( June 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message).Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article needs additional citations for verification.
