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For other uses, see Find (disambiguation).The find program is a directory search utility on Unix-like platforms. It searches through one or more directory trees of a filesystem, locating files based on some user-specified criteria. By default, find returns all files below the current working directory. Further, find allows the user to specify an action to be taken on each matched file. Thus, it is an extremely powerful program for applying actions to many files. It also supports regex matching.The locate programs use a database of indexed files obtained through find (updated at regular intervals, typically by cron job) to provide a faster method of searching the entire filesystem for files by name. This sacrifices overall efficiency (because filesystems are regularly interrogated even when no users needs information)and absolute accuracy (since the database is not updated in real time) for significant speed improvements (particularly on very large filesystems). On fast systems with small drives locate is not necessary or desirable. |
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