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Byte Size: Changing Habits with the Command Line

Jarret Bryan on June 19, 2018

I think one of the more tangible elements of tracking my progress while being a coding beginner is tracking how my habits have changed in the mos...
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Thomas H Jones II •

ls is good for finding stuff when you basically know where the target "stuff" is. If you want real power, look at the find command.

  • Want to see all the files you've modified in the last 3 days? find <DIR> -mtime -3
  • Disk is getting full and you want to identify disused files for archival? find <DIR> -mtime +&lt;DAYS>
  • Want to know where various DVD images you downloaded got to? find <DIR> -type f -name "*.iso"
  • Want to find all files that are actually symlinks? find <DIR> -type l
  • Want to see what files have the world-write permission set on them? find <DIR> -perm /0002 -type f

The possibilities are near endless, especially once you add find's -exec built-in function or pipeline your find to other tools via xargs (e.g., find <DIR> -type f | xargs grep -l <STRING> will provide you a list of files that contain a given string).

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Jarret Bryan •

This is incredibly helpful! Thanks so much, I'm going to try these out ASAP!

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Franco Traversaro •

"seems to be a really powerful tool"? A good half of your operating system is made of bash scripts! 😉