find

(Modified 2009 Nov 19)

Find

I've seen two syntaxes:

```
find dir_name/ string*ext -print
```
```
find "string*ext" -print
```

In the first, the directory name to be searched must be named explicitly. In the second, the directory names is optional, but the string must be enclosed in quotes. I'll be general and include both the directory name and enclose in quotes.

To search under the current directory:
```
find . -name "*pattern*" -print
```
To search for only directories under the current directory:
```
find . -name "*pattern*" -type d -print
```
To find normal files, change the d to f.
To search for only directories under the current directory:
```
find . -name "*pattern*" -type d -print
```

To search for directories and sort them:

find . -name "*pattern*" -type d -print | sort

To print the date:

find -name "*pattern*" -printf "%t %p\n"

where:

%t prints the time (where day of the week and month are written as text)
%p prints the filename
\n adds a carriage return

To print the date as a number:

find -name "*pattern*" -printf "%T+ %p\n"

To sort the files by date:

find -name "*pattern*" -printf "%T+ %p\n" | sort

To print the file size:

find -name "*pattern*" -printf "%s bytes %p\n"

To sort the files by size:
```
find -name "*pattern*" -printf "%s bytes %p\n" | sort -n
```
Without the flag -n, the sort command would simply sort by the first digit, then by tiebreakers, even if the file sizes have different numbers of digits.

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