In a recent Opensource.com article, Lewis Cowles launched the discover command.
discover is likely one of the extra highly effective and versatile command-line applications within the day by day toolbox, so it is price spending just a little extra time on it.
At a minimal, discover takes a path to seek out issues. For instance:
discover /
will discover (and print) each file on the system. And since every thing is a file, you’re going to get a number of output to type by way of. This in all probability does not show you how to discover what you are in search of. You can change the trail argument to slender issues down a bit, however it’s nonetheless probably not any extra useful than utilizing the ls command. So it’s essential take into consideration what you are attempting to find.
Perhaps you wish to discover all of the JPEG recordsdata in your house listing. The -name argument permits you to prohibit your outcomes to recordsdata that match the given sample.
discover ~ -name '*jpg'
But wait! What if a few of them have an uppercase extension? -iname is like -name, however it’s case-insensitive.
discover ~ -iname '*jpg'
Great! But the eight.three identify scheme is so 1985. Some of the images may need a .jpeg extension. Fortunately, we will mix patterns with an “or,” represented by -o.
discover ~ ( -iname 'jpeg' -o -iname 'jpg' )
We’re getting nearer. But what when you have some directories that finish in jpg? (Why you named a listing bucketofjpg as an alternative of photos is past me.) We can modify our command with the -type argument to look just for recordsdata.
discover ~ ( -iname '*jpeg' -o -iname '*jpg' ) -type f
Or possibly you want to seek out these oddly named directories so you may rename them later:
discover ~ ( -iname '*jpeg' -o -iname '*jpg' ) -type d
It seems you have been taking a number of photos these days, so let’s slender this right down to recordsdata which have modified within the final week.
discover ~ ( -iname '*jpeg' -o -iname '*jpg' ) -type f -mtime -7
You can do time filters primarily based on file standing change time (ctime), modification time (mtime), or entry time (atime). These are in days, so if you need finer-grained management, you may specific it in minutes as an alternative (cmin, mmin, and amin, respectively). Unless you realize precisely the time you need, you will in all probability prefix the quantity with + (greater than) or – (lower than).
But possibly you do not care about your photos. Maybe you are operating out of disk house, so that you wish to discover all the large (let’s outline that as “greater than 1 gigabyte”) recordsdata within the log listing:
discover /var/log -size +1G
Or possibly you wish to discover all of the recordsdata owned by bcotton in /information:
discover /information -owner bcotton
You may search for recordsdata primarily based on permissions. Perhaps you wish to discover all of the world-readable recordsdata in your house listing to ensure you’re not oversharing.
discover ~ -perm -o=r
This publish solely scratches the floor of what discover can do. Combining checks with Boolean logic may give you unbelievable flexibility to seek out precisely the recordsdata you are in search of. And with arguments like -exec or -delete, you may have discover take motion on what it… finds. Have any favourite discover expressions? Share them within the feedback!