A Unix/Linux find Command Tutorial ©2002–2009 by Wayne Pollock, Tampa Florida USA. All rights reserved. Locating Files: The find command is used to locate files on a Unix or Linux system. find will search any set of directories you specify for files that match the supplied search criteria . You can search for files by name, owner, group, type, permissions, date, and other criteria. The search is recursive in that it will search all subdirectories too. The syntax looks like this: find where-to-look criteria what-to-do All arguments to find are optional, and there are defaults for all parts. (This may depend on which version of find is used. Here we discuss the freely available GNU version of find , which is the version available on YborStudent .) For example where-to-look defaults to . (that is, the current working directory), criteria defaults to none (that is, show all files), and what-to-do (known as the find action ) defaults to -print (that is, display the names of ...