Find Command in Linux: Examples of ctime, type, newer, inum, Uid

Not able to delete files in Linux                                               Find command with mtime and atime options

Find command in linux is most important for linux administrators as well as shell script developers. It is really very fast in execution speed and it is useful because of availability of wide variety options with find command.

Find has many options available like ctime i.e. creation time, type – type of file, newer – compare files and decide, it is newer or older as compared to one file, inum- inode number.

Examples:

• Search files by inode numbers with find command: find inum

root@hello:~/ctier/examples# find . -inum 5770071 ./README.txt root@hello:~/ctier/examples#

•  Search files newer as compared to given file: find newer

root@hello:~/ctier/examples# find . -type f -newer filename root@hello:~/ctier/examples# find . -type f -newer README.txt

Newer option helpful to get new files as compared to given file timestamp.

• Search files older as compared to given file: find newer

root@hello:~/ctier/examples# find . -type f !-newer README.txt

To reverse the output of 2^nd example, we need to put !mark before the –newer option. It will negate the meaning of command after the mark.

•  Search files by uid: find uid

root@hello:~#find . -type f -uidNumeric USERID root@hello:~#find . -type f -uid 1002

•  Search files whose creation time is older than 30 days

root@hello:~#find . -type f -ctime +30

•  Search files whose creation time is within last 30 days

root@hello:~#find . -type f -ctime -30

•  Search log files whose creation time is older than 30 days and delete it

In this case, we need to search files whose creation time is older than 30 days and need to provide this list of files to the rm command with the help of –exec option. We can run any file manipulation command after exec option e.g. ls –lrt, cat, wc etc.

root@hello:~#find . -type f -name "*.log" -ctime +30 -exec rm -rf {} \;

If you need more examples or facing issues with some option then please write us at linuxconcepts@gmail.com.

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