View source for Find: 10 Useful Examples of Find

==Useful Examples of the Find Command==

===1) Finding Files with a specific name===

The basic usage of the find command, Finds all files named wp-config.php.  Example, find all the wp-config.php files showing all wordpress installations.

 find . -name "wp-config.php"

===2) Finding files with specific permissons ===
When running a webserver, one of the worst things you can have is a file with 777 permissions.  Lets use the find command to check for files/directories with the 777 permissions

 find /var/www/ -perm 777

===3 Executing Commands on the Files Found by the Find Command===
This is a command I use all the time, to adjust the permissions on someones web files. First command will find all files and change them to have 664 permissions

 find /var/www/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Now we will want to change all the Directories to 2755

 find /var/www/ -type d -exec chmod 2755 {} \;

Now we can combine them to make them a one liner

 find /var/www/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \; && find /var/www/ -type d -exec chmod 2755 {} \;

===4) Find all empty files (zero byte file) ===

We have clients that run wget commands in their cron without dumping it into the /dev/null, so this leave zero byte files 

 find . -empty -exec ls -l {} \;

and now if you want to remove all those files

 find . -empty -exec rm {} \;

===5) List only the files found within the current directory ===

This very useful when you only want to find files in the parent directory.  Lets find all the php files in a specific directory.

 find /var/www/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -iname *.php 

===6) Find the top 5 largest files on a clients account===

Every now and then a client will get close or go over their quota and you need to find the largest files.

 find /var/www/ -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n -r | head -5

===7) Find the top 5 smalles files on a clients account===

This command is basically the same as the above command just changing the sort order
 
 find /var/www/ -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n  | head -5

===8) Replace the space in pdf files with an underscore===

We have clients that sometimes need to remove the space in pdf files and replace them with underscores

 find /var/www/ -type f -iname “*.mp3″ -exec rename “s/ /_/g” {} \;

===9) Find files Changed in the last Hour===
When clients get hacked we can run a find command to identify potental files that could have been hacked around that time. Say the files were hacked with in the last hour, we could run:

 find /var/www/ -mmin -60

===10) Find files Changed in the last (n) Days===

Sometimes, you don't notice the hack right away and you need to search all files modified in the 2 days

 find /var/www/ -mtime -2

*tip, you can output them to a text file to provide the client so they can review the files

 find /var/www/ -mtime -2 > ~/hacked-files.txt