Gentoo Development Guide
find -- Finding Files
The find utility can be used to search for and perform commands upon
groups of files matching a given set of criteria. The basic usage is
find path rules.
For portability purposes, always specify a path. Do not rely
upon find defaulting to the current working directory if no
path is provided.
Useful rules include:
| Rule | Effect |
-name "blah" |
Only find files named blah. The * and ?
wildcards may be used but will probably need escaping by the
shell.
|
-type f |
Find only regular files, not directories. |
-type d |
Find only directories. |
-type l |
Find only symbolic links. |
-user foo |
Find only files belonging to user foo. It is best to use
named users rather than numeric UIDs. In particular, root
may not be UID 0 on some systems.
|
-group foo |
Find only files belonging to group foo. It is best to use
named groups rather than numeric GIDs.
|
The -mindepth and -maxdepth options are GNU extensions
that should be avoided if possible.
By default, find will echo a list of matching files to the
standard output. This can be used in a while loop:
find "${S}" -type f | while read f ; do
einfo "Doing unholy things to ${f}"
done
Warning
The die construct will not work during the above loop.
See die and Subshells.
Or a for loop (for small numbers of files):
for f in $(find "${S}" -type f) ; do
einfo "Calling down holy vengance upon ${f}"
done
Warning
In both cases, files with weird characters or spaces in their names may cause serious problems.
As an alternative, find supports a -exec argument. It
accepts a command to run, terminated by a semicolon. Inside the
command, the string {} is replaced by the name of the current
matched file. Be careful with escaping to ensure that bash
doesn't gobble up the special characters:
find "${S}" -name '*.backup' -exec rm '{}' \;
See find-1 and IEEE1003.1-2004-find for further details and examples.
