The "find" command enables you to find a file based on its name, type,
owner, creation time, size, group, and other criteria. The find command
looks as follows:

find directory -option criteria

Searching by Name
To locate a file by its name, use the -name option. For example, the
following command locates a file called report in the forecast
directory:

$find forecast -name report

The -print option instructs find to display the file(s) it locates and
their paths on the standard output. For example:

$find summer -name july_report.dat -print
summer/july_report.dat

If you specify an absolute path in the command, find will display
absolute paths, too:

$find /home/jane/summer -name july_report.dat -print
/home/jane/summer/july_report.dat

The special characters . and .. represent your current working directory
and its parent directory, respectively. To locate a file called
invoices.txt in the current directory and display the results on the
screen, type:

$find . -name invoices.txt -print
./invoices.txt

Searching by Type
The -type option enables you to locate a file according to its type.
-type takes a single character that specifies the file type as follows:

Symbol Meaning
b block device file
c character device file
d directory file
f regular file
p named pipe
l symbolic link

For example, to find the directory customers located under the /home
directory, type:

$find /home -name customers -type d -print
/home/letters/customers

Miscellaneous Criteria
You can locate files according to their size by using the -size option.
For example, to find a file whose size is 3 blocks, type:

$find customers -size 3

To specify a file's size in bytes rather than blocks, append the letter
'c' to the size value:

$find /home -size 2048c

To locate a file by its group, use the -group option:

$find /home -name outline -group developers

To locate all the files created during the last 15 minutes in the
current directory, use the -mmin option like this:

$find -mmin +0 -mmin -15

To find files that have been modified within the last two days, type:

$find -mtime -2

Wildcards
You may use shell wildcards as a filename. The following command locates
all the files that have a .h extension under the directory sources:

$find sources -name '*.h'

You must quote the filename when using wildcards. Otherwise, the shell
would attempt to evaluate the filename before passing it to the command.

» posted by ITworld staff

ITworld

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