Miscellaneous cli tools

Updated: 15 September 2025

Find all items called our_cron. Send error output to /dev/null, which hides error messages e.g. ‘Permission denied’

find -name our_cron 2> /dev/null

Find symbolic links, recursively down from the current directory

find . -type l

Find files in directory /tmp larger than 100MB

sudo find /tmp -type f -size +100M

Find directories with either foo or bar in their name

find . -type d \( -iname '*foo*' -or -iname '*bar*' \) | sort

Find files or directories with either lvim or lunarvim in their name

find . \( -iname '*lvim*' -or -iname '*lunarvim*' \)

Find files modified within the last 6hrs i.e. 0.25 of 1 day

find /home/chris -type f -mtime -0.25

Find files where name (case insensitive) matches ‘*.exe’

find ~/.nuget/packages -iname "*.exe"

Find directories where name starts with ‘site’

find . -type d -name 'site*'

Find any of the named files (risky, test first)

find this-dir -type f \( -name "foo" -o -name "bar" -o -name "log" \)

Find all files not in the git directory

find . -type f -not -path "./.git/*"

Find, but exclude multiple directories

find ~ -iname '*nvim*' ! -path '/path/one/*' ! -path '/path/two/*' ! -path '/path/three/*'

Find directories with name including let but search no more that 2 levels down

find -maxdepth 2 -type d -iname '*let*'

exec

find uses ; or + to terminate the -exec command. Therefore \; must be used because ; is one of the operators (also && or ||) which separates shell commands.

Find files by text in the file.

find . -type f -name "*.java" -exec grep -il string {} \;

-i: ignore case
-l: show filenames, not the match.