Day 14/ 30 Days of Linux Mastery: Find Command
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Amanda Igwe

Amanda Igwe @amandaigwe

About: Cloud Engineer | DevOps | Security | Linux | Automation

Joined:
Apr 7, 2025

Day 14/ 30 Days of Linux Mastery: Find Command

Publish Date: May 7
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Table of Contents

Introduction

Welcome back to Day 14 of this practical Linux challenge! Today, we are diving into one of the most useful Linux commands: find.

This command helps you search for files and folders fast, flexible, and powerful.

What is the find Command?

The find command is used to look for files and directories in your system based on conditions like:

  • Name
  • Size
  • File type
  • Date modified
  • User ownership
  • And more...

This is especially useful in production environments where systems grow large and messy fast.

Core find Commands

Basic Syntax for find is

find [path] [condition] [action]

# Example 

find /home -name "file.txt"    - # This searches for file.txt inside the /home directory.
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More commonly used find commands are listed in the table below.

find command Meaning
-name Search by file name
-type File type: f for file, d for directory
-mtime Files modified X days ago (+, -, or exact number)
-size Search by file size (e.g., +5M for greater than 5MB)
-user Owned by a specific user
-exec Run command on found files
-delete Deletes the files (use with caution!)

Real-World Scenario: find Command

  • Find a File by Name 
bash
find / -name "*.conf"     - # Searches for a file that has .conf inside /
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f1 description

  • Find Files Modified in the Last 3 Days 
bash

find /root -type f -mtime -3       - # Useful for checking recent file changes or uploads.

find /root -type d -mtime -3       - # use d for directories or folders
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f2 description

f3 description

  • Find Large Files (More Than 100MB) 
find / -type f -size +100M    - # Great for finding what’s eating up disk space.

find / -type f -size -20k   - # check files less than 20kb
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f4 description

  • Find Files and Delete Them 
touch /tmp/files.tmp /tmp/newfilesv{1..5}.tmp   # let's create new files in the /tmp folder

 ls /tmp  - # to verify the created files

 find /tmp -type f -name "*.tmp"     - # find the files with .tmp in /tmp

find /tmp -type f -name "*.tmp" -delete    - # Deletes all .tmp files in /tmp
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f5 description

f6 description

f8 description

Let's say your/var/log directory is filling up fast, and you need to:

  • Find all .log files older than 7 days.

  • Delete them to save space.

  • We will first check what you will delete.

find /var/log -name "*.log" -mtime +7
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  • Now you are sure of what to delete, you can delete! 
find /var/log -name "*.log" -mtime +7 -delete
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We have saved disk space! Great.

Conclusion

You can use man find to explore more options on your RHEL system. You will be surprised how much power this one command holds.

You can also use some wildcards like:

  • * means - Any number of characters
  • ? means - A single character
  • [a-z] means - Any letter a to z

If you use file*, you are telling Linux: “Find anything that starts with ‘file’.”

If this is helpful to you, feel free to bookmark, comment, like and follow me for Day 15!

Let's Connect!

If you want to connect or share your journey, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
I am always happy to learn and build with others in the tech space.

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