finding files

And actually so much more.

find with no arguments

Will print all the files and directories from this working directory.

# same!
find
find .

Filtering

The knee-jerk reaction is to say “oh grep is exactly for this! Wonderful!

Example: find this file (find.md) in the repository

$ cd cs-tech-primer 
$ find . | grep find.md
./docs/6_unix/find.md

Better?

$ find . -name find.md
./docs/6_unix/find.md

But I want the contents

Also possible. There is scope-creep within find to give us xargs-like functionality.

The {} is placeholder for all the paths that are found by find.

Example: With this repository, find all the files named readme.md, and print them all out to the console:

find . -name readme.md -exec cat {} \;

Pretty useful

We could find and rename heaps of files. We could find and delete a bunch of files. We could write a shell script, and pass all the paths to that to do some serious processing on it.