Find Tips

find is the Unix utility to find files based on various criteria. Read the man page it's quite useful.

This command will quickly remove any files from the current folder and below that have not be modified in the last 14 days.

 find . -mtime +14 -exec rm -f {} \;

This incantation can be used to discover & cleanup .rpmnew files that RPM installs.

find /etc -name "*.rpmnew" -print
find /etc -name "*.rpmnew" -exec rm {} \;

Find files that are larger than 1G (one gigabyte)

sudo find / -size +1G -print

Some examples used in maintenance of Rsnapshot

Sum the size of files ending in .tmp in folder daily.1

find daily.1 -type f -name "*.tmp" -ls | awk '{ sum += $7 } END { print sum }'

Sum the size of singly-linked files in folder daily.1 (In rsnapshot, singly-linked files are safe to compress)

find daily.1 -links 1 -type f -ls | awk '{ sum += $7 } END { print sum }'

Compress files using find

find daily.1 -links 1 -size +1M ! -name "*.bz2" -print | grep -v \.svn  | xargs bzip2 -v