Today I’d like to discuss one of my favorite shell commands: find<\/strong>. Many of us are familiar with using the Microsoft Windows “Search Tool” in XP to Find Files or Folders, files by date, etc.\u00a0 Finding a file this way involves populating text fields, drop-down menus, and (possibly) date-range selectors to find the files you’re looking for.<\/p>\n In unix and linux, the find command is used like this:<\/p>\n Here’s a find command example<\/strong>.\u00a0 Let’s say we want to find .mp3<\/strong> files within your “Music” folder (\/home\/yourName\/Music).\u00a0 For this example, let’s pretend that you have the following files: song1.mp3, song1.wav, song2.mp3, song2.wav, song3.mp3, and song3.wav<\/em>.<\/p>\n To find files in the Music directory, the command is: [don’t type the dollar sign- it’s the prompt, start typing at the word “find”.]<\/p>\n We used the “-type f<\/span>” option to find a regular file and not a directory.\u00a0 The output (above) shows that we have media files (mp3 and wav) in the Music folder.\u00a0 Remember we’re not interested in listing<\/em> files so much as performing a ‘find’ on them.<\/p>\n On a Linux system you can use a GUI program to find files, but you can find them faster using the find command<\/strong>.\u00a0 With its many options, find’s power is in its flexibility.\u00a0 Flexibility to do what??? Finding files is finding files, right?<\/em> Yes, I suppose so.<\/p>\n But what if you wanted to perform an action on files that you find?<\/strong> In Windows you’d have to first find them, navigate to them, and then (possibly) perform actions on them one file at a time.\u00a0 While the steps are few, they can be manual and tedious, thus begging for a shortcut.<\/p>\n Let’s take our example a step further.\u00a0 Let’s filter the command to only find ‘mp3’ files.\u00a0 We’ll add the “-name<\/span>” option to search wildcard patterns for files ending in mp3.<\/p>\n If you wanted to find only the .wav files, then you’d change *mp3 to *wav.\u00a0 Now let’s use find to<\/strong> move files to another folder<\/strong>.\u00a0 For the sake of neatness, let’s create 2 sub-folders (also known as sub-directories) to hold mp3 files and a separate sub-folder for wav files.<\/p>\n To create a new directory use mkdir [folderPath]<\/strong><\/span>.\u00a0 If you do not specify a folder path, the shell creates the directory within the current working folder.\u00a0 More on “current working folder” later.\u00a0 For now, let’s assume that you’re in the “home\/yourName” folder.<\/p>\n Creating folders “Music\/mp3” and “Music\/wav” requires 2 identical commands.\u00a0 However, you can create 2 sub-directories in the “Music” folder with the command below.<\/p>\n B<\/span>rackets<\/span> tell the shell to expect a sequence of characters.\u00a0 The comma separates<\/span> each new directory.\u00a0 This is the same as issuing mkdir Music\/mp3<\/span> and mkdir Music\/wav<\/span>.<\/p>\n With the sub-folders created, we have a neater storage arrangement for our music files.\u00a0 But we’re not done yet.\u00a0 Remember that our “Music” folder currently stores both mp3 and wav files.\u00a0 Let’s move each type into their respective sub-directory.\u00a0 To make this happen we add an action<\/strong> onto our command known as “-exec<\/span>” (followed by the “command terminator” \\;<\/span>) and the mv<\/strong><\/span> command to move the files as seen in the example below:<\/p>\n
\nfind is awesome.\u00a0 It locates files on your unix\/linux system by using options and criteria.<\/p>\nfind [directory to search] [options] [actions]<\/span><\/pre>\n$ find Music\/ -type f [press ENTER]<\/span>\r\nMusic\/song1.mp3\r\nMusic\/song1.wav\r\nMusic\/song2.mp3\r\nMusic\/song2.wav\r\nMusic\/song3.mp3\r\nMusic\/song3.wav<\/pre>\n$ find Music\/ -type f -name \"*mp3\"<\/span>\r\nMusic\/song1.mp3\r\nMusic\/song2.mp3\r\nMusic\/song3.mp3<\/pre>\nmkdir Music\/{mp3,wav}<\/span><\/pre>\nmv fileOldLocation fileNewLocation<\/span><\/pre>\n