How to find files and directories in Linux?

Hello Friends,

Today I am going to write a short blog on find and diff command which is very important for DevOps engineers.

The find command is used to search files or directories in Linux. We can use the find command in various conditions like finding a file by

Syntax: find / <options> <filename>

Options	Usage
-name	To search a file with its name
-user	To search a file who is the owner or user of a file
-group	To search for a file belonging to a particular group

/ => It means it will search in all directories.

. => It means it will search in current directories

Now we will see the find command with some use cases.

How to search a file1 in the home directory?

 [root@ip-172-31-89-38 ~]# find ~ -name file1.txt
 /root/file1.txt

How to search a file1 in the current directory?

 [root@ip-172-31-89-38 ~]# find . -name file1.txt
 ./file1.txt

How to search all files whose permission is 777?

 [root@ip-172-31-89-38 ~]# find -type f -perm 777
 ./file3.txt

How to search all empty files?

 [root@ip-172-31-89-38 ~]# find . -type f -empty

How to display the files which are older than 30 days?

mtime ==> it means modified time.

Display 30 days old files in the current working directory.

$find. -mtime +30 print

Display 30 days old files in a specific directory.

$find <directory path> -mtime +30 print
How to delete all the files which are older than 30 days?

$find <directory path> -mtime +30 delete

diff command is used to see the difference between two files.

Syntax: diff <file1> <file2>

I hope this blog would be informative.

Thank You for reading this blog

Parimal Pradhan

You can follow me on LinkedIn for my daily updates:- linkedin.com/in/parimal-pradhan-b62021168

Find and diff command in Linux