Day 14/ 30 Days of Linux Mastery: Find Command

Table of Contents

• Introduction


• What is the find Command?


• Core find Commands


• Real-World Scenario: find Command


• Conclusion


• Let's Connect

Introduction

Welcome back to Day 14 of this practical Linux challenge! Today, we are diving into one of the most useful Linux commands: find.

This command helps you search for files and folders fast, flexible, and powerful.

What is the find Command?

The find command is used to look for files and directories in your system based on conditions like:

• Name


• Size


• File type


• Date modified


• User ownership


• And more...

This is especially useful in production environments where systems grow large and messy fast.

Core find Commands

Basic Syntax for find is

find [path] [condition] [action]



# Example 



find /home -name "file.txt"    - # This searches for file.txt inside the /home directory.

More commonly used find commands are listed in the table below.

Real-World Scenario: find Command

• Find a File by Name
  

bash

find / -name "*.conf"     - # Searches for a file that has .conf inside / 

• Find Files Modified in the Last 3 Days
  

bash



find /root -type f -mtime -3       - # Useful for checking recent file changes or uploads.



find /root -type d -mtime -3       - # use d for directories or folders

• Find Large Files (More Than 100MB)
  

find / -type f -size +100M    - # Great for finding what’s eating up disk space.



find / -type f -size -20k   - # check files less than 20kb

• Find Files and Delete Them
  

touch /tmp/files.tmp /tmp/newfilesv{1..5}.tmp   # let's create new files in the /tmp folder



 ls /tmp  - # to verify the created files



 find /tmp -type f -name "*.tmp"     - # find the files with .tmp in /tmp



find /tmp -type f -name "*.tmp" -delete    - # Deletes all .tmp files in /tmp

Let's say your/var/log directory is filling up fast, and you need to:

• Find all .log files older than 7 days.




• Delete them to save space.




• We will first check what you will delete.
  
  

find /var/log -name "*.log" -mtime +7

• Now you are sure of what to delete, you can delete!
  

find /var/log -name "*.log" -mtime +7 -delete

We have saved disk space! Great.

Conclusion

You can use man find to explore more options on your RHEL system. You will be surprised how much power this one command holds.

You can also use some wildcards like:

• * means - Any number of characters


• ? means - A single character


• [a-z] means - Any letter a to z

If you use file*, you are telling Linux: “Find anything that starts with ‘file’.”

If this is helpful to you, feel free to bookmark, comment, like and follow me for Day 15!

Let's Connect!

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I am always happy to learn and build with others in the tech space.

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