FIND(1) General Commands Manual FIND(1)
NAME
find - search for files in a directory hierarchy
SYNOPSIS
find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D debugopts] [-Olevel] [starting-point...] [expression]
DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents the GNU version of find. GNU find searches the directory tree rooted at each given
starting-point by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence
(see section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for
or), at which point find moves on to the next file name. If no starting-point is specified, `.' is assumed.
If you are using find in an environment where security is important (for example if you are using it to search
directories that are writable by other users), you should read the `Security Considerations' chapter of the
findutils documentation, which is called Finding Files and comes with findutils. That document also includes
a lot more detail and discussion than this manual page, so you may find it a more useful source of informa‐
tion.
OPTIONS
The -H, -L and -P options control the treatment of symbolic links. Command-line arguments following these are
taken to be names of files or directories to be examined, up to the first argument that begins with `-', or
the argument `(' or `!'. That argument and any following arguments are taken to be the expression describing
what is to be searched for. If no paths are given, the current directory is used. If no expression is given,
the expression -print is used (but you should probably consider using -print0 instead, anyway).
This manual page talks about `options' within the expression list. These options control the behaviour of
find but are specified immediately after the last path name. The five `real' options -H, -L, -P, -D and -O
