Comments on: More Linux and UNIX find command options

By: tim

tim — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:51:57 +0000

this works great for avoiding paths to be printed where the said object is not present

find / name “text” 2>/dev/null | grep -r text

You can skip 2>/dev/null altogether if you don’t want to look at paths.

By: J_R

J_R — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:26:04 +0000

Using “2>/dev/null” to prevent “Permission denied” does not work if trying to find which file(s) a particular piece of text occurs in e.g.

find . -type f -print | xargs grep “dctm.gif” 2>/dev/null

Only works with if you are trying to find an actual file(s)

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:25:20 +0000

Great tips and very useful.

Many thanks
Jim

By: Shan

Shan — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:24:53 +0000

Dealing with “Permission denied” in find which is really useful to me. Especially When I try to find the largest files in solaris, I get this error. Now I am getting my desired output with out this error. Thanks for your tips.

With best regards
Shan

By: Jon Emmons

Jon Emmons — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 01:00:42 +0000

Gain, From my experience -mtime 3 would return (and in this example remove) the files which were modified exactly 3 days ago. mtime -3 finds files modified less than 3 days ago and -mtime +3 would find files modified more than three days ago. I've used this syntax on Linux and several varieties of UNIX but these things do vary by platform. What platform have you used this on? If there is a platform which has the results you mention I'd like to add a warning to this article! Thanks.

By: gian

gian — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 08:56:53 +0000

hello Jon,
thanks for the help.
just to make you notice that:
$ find . -name ‘*.txt’ -mtime -3 -exec rm {} \;
will delete all txt files, since “-3″ means “with a date that is 3 days ahead”. If you wish to delete files which are 3 days older you should type:
$ find . -name ‘*.txt’ -mtime 3 -exec rm {} \;
ciao

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:34:55 +0000

Thanks! Useful!

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:27:02 +0000

“Dealing with “Permission denied” in find”

– thanks Jon, that was exactly the command I was just looking for

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:41:24 +0000

An easy way to get rid of the error messages is to have find test for permissions before trying to go into the directory:

For example to look for files named “help” use find like this:

find . $ -type d ! -exec test -x {} -a -r {} \; -prune $ -o \( -name help ) -exec ls -ld {} \;

The crucial part is -type d ! -exec test -x {} -a -r {} \; -prune which test for the readability of the directory and does not traverse it if it is not readable or executable.