This is find.info, produced by makeinfo version 5.2 from find.texi.

This file documents the GNU utilities for finding files that match
certain criteria and performing various operations on them.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A
copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free
Documentation License".
INFO-DIR-SECTION Basics
START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
* Finding files: (find). Operating on files matching certain criteria.
END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY

INFO-DIR-SECTION Individual utilities
START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
* find: (find)Invoking find. Finding and acting on files.
* locate: (find)Invoking locate. Finding files in a database.
* updatedb: (find)Invoking updatedb. Building the locate database.
* xargs: (find)Invoking xargs. Operating on many files.
END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY

File: find.info, Node: Top, Next: Introduction, Up: (dir)

GNU Findutils
*************

This file documents the GNU utilities for finding files that match
certain criteria and performing various operations on them.

This file documents the GNU utilities for finding files that match
certain criteria and performing various actions on them.

This is edition 4.6.0, for 'find' version 4.6.0.

* Menu:

* Introduction:: Summary of the tasks this manual describes.
* Finding Files:: Finding files that match certain criteria.
* Actions:: Doing things to files you have found.
* Databases:: Maintaining file name databases.
* File Permissions:: How to control access to files.
* Date input formats:: Specifying literal times.
* Configuration:: Options you can select at compile time.
* Reference:: Summary of how to invoke the programs.
* Common Tasks:: Solutions to common real-world problems.
* Worked Examples:: Examples demonstrating more complex points.
* Security Considerations:: Security issues relating to findutils.
* Error Messages:: Explanations of some messages you might see.
* GNU Free Documentation License:: Copying and sharing this manual.
* Primary Index:: The components of 'find' expressions.

File: find.info, Node: Introduction, Next: Finding Files, Prev: Top, Up: Top

1 Introduction
**************

This manual shows how to find files that meet criteria you specify, and
how to perform various actions on the files that you find. The
principal programs that you use to perform these tasks are 'find',
'locate', and 'xargs'. Some of the examples in this manual use
capabilities specific to the GNU versions of those programs.

GNU 'find' was originally written by Eric Decker, with enhancements
by David MacKenzie, Jay Plett, and Tim Wood. GNU 'xargs' was originally
written by Mike Rendell, with enhancements by David MacKenzie. GNU
'locate' and its associated utilities were originally written by James
Woods, with enhancements by David MacKenzie. The idea for 'find
-print0' and 'xargs -0' came from Dan Bernstein. The current maintainer
of GNU findutils (and this manual) is James Youngman. Many other people
have contributed bug fixes, small improvements, and helpful suggestions.
Thanks!

To report a bug in GNU findutils, please use the form on the Savannah
web site at 'http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils'. Reporting
bugs this way means that you will then be able to track progress in
fixing the problem.

If you don't have web access, you can also just send mail to the
mailing list. The mailing list <bug-findutils@gnu.org> carries
discussion of bugs in findutils, questions and answers about the
software and discussion of the development of the programs. To join the
list, send email to <bug-findutils-request@gnu.org>.

Please read any relevant sections of this manual before asking for
help on the mailing list. You may also find it helpful to read the
NON-BUGS section of the 'find' manual page.

If you ask for help on the mailing list, people will be able to help
you much more effectively if you include the following things:

* The version of the software you are running. You can find this out
by running 'locate --version'.
* What you were trying to do
* The _exact_ command line you used
* The _exact_ output you got (if this is very long, try to find a
smaller example which exhibits the same problem)
* The output you expected to get

It may also be the case that the bug you are describing has already
been fixed, if it is a bug. Please check the most recent findutils
releases at <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/findutils> and, if possible, the
development branch at <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/findutils>. If you take
the time to check that your bug still exists in current releases, this
will greatly help people who want to help you solve your problem.
Please also be aware that if you obtained findutils as part of the
GNU/Linux 'distribution', the distributions often lag seriously behind
findutils releases, even the stable release. Please check the GNU FTP
site.

* Menu:

* Scope::
* Overview::
* find Expressions::

File: find.info, Node: Scope, Next: Overview, Up: Introduction

1.1 Scope
=========

For brevity, the word "file" in this manual means a regular file, a
directory, a symbolic link, or any other kind of node that has a
directory entry. A directory entry is also called a "file name". A
file name may contain some, all, or none of the directories in a path
that leads to the file. These are all examples of what this manual
calls "file names":

parser.c
README
./budget/may-94.sc
fred/.cshrc
/usr/local/include/termcap.h

A "directory tree" is a directory and the files it contains, all of
its subdirectories and the files they contain, etc. It can also be a
single non-directory file.

These programs enable you to find the files in one or more directory
trees that:

* have names that contain certain text or match a certain pattern;
* are links to certain files;
* were last used during a certain period of time;
* are within a certain size range;
* are of a certain type (regular file, directory, symbolic link,
etc.);
* are owned by a certain user or group;
* have certain access permissions or special mode bits;
* contain text that matches a certain pattern;
* are within a certain depth in the directory tree;
* or some combination of the above.

Once you have found the files you're looking for (or files that are
potentially the ones you're looking for), you can do more to them than
simply list their names. You can get any combination of the files'
attributes, or process the files in many ways, either individually or in
groups of various sizes. Actions that you might want to perform on the
files you have found include, but are not limited to:

* view or edit
* store in an archive
* remove or rename
* change access permissions
* classify into groups

This manual describes how to perform each of those tasks, and more.

File: find.info, Node: Overview, Next: find Expressions, Prev: Scope, Up: Introduction

1.2 Overview
============

The principal programs used for making lists of files that match given
criteria and running commands on them are 'find', 'locate', and 'xargs'.
An additional command, 'updatedb', is used by system administrators to
create databases for 'locate' to use.

'find' searches for files in a directory hierarchy and prints
information about the files it found. It is run like this:

find [FILE...] [EXPRESSION]

Here is a typical use of 'find'. This example prints the names of all
files in the directory tree rooted in '/usr/src' whose name ends with
'.c' and that are larger than 100 Kilobytes.
find /usr/src -name '*.c' -size +100k -print

Notice that the wildcard must be enclosed in quotes in order to
protect it from expansion by the shell.

'locate' searches special file name databases for file names that
match patterns. The system administrator runs the 'updatedb' program to
create the databases. 'locate' is run like this:

locate [OPTION...] PATTERN...

This example prints the names of all files in the default file name
database whose name ends with 'Makefile' or 'makefile'. Which file
names are stored in the database depends on how the system administrator
ran 'updatedb'.
locate '*[Mm]akefile'

The name 'xargs', pronounced EX-args, means "combine arguments."
'xargs' builds and executes command lines by gathering together
arguments it reads on the standard input. Most often, these arguments
are lists of file names generated by 'find'. 'xargs' is run like this:

xargs [OPTION...] [COMMAND [INITIAL-ARGUMENTS]]

The following command searches the files listed in the file 'file-list'
and prints all of the lines in them that contain the word 'typedef'.
xargs grep typedef < file-list

File: find.info, Node: find Expressions, Prev: Overview, Up: Introduction

1.3 'find' Expressions
======================

The expression that 'find' uses to select files consists of one or more
"primaries", each of which is a separate command line argument to
'find'. 'find' evaluates the expression each time it processes a file.
An expression can contain any of the following types of primaries:

"options"
affect overall operation rather than the processing of a specific
file;
"tests"
return a true or false value, depending on the file's attributes;
"actions"
have side effects and return a true or false value; and
"operators"
connect the other arguments and affect when and whether they are
evaluated.

You can omit the operator between two primaries; it defaults to
'-and'. *Note Combining Primaries With Operators::, for ways to connect
primaries into more complex expressions. If the expression contains no
actions other than '-prune', '-print' is performed on all files for
which the entire expression is true (*note Print File Name::).

Options take effect immediately, rather than being evaluated for each
file when their place in the expression is reached. Therefore, for
clarity, it is best to place them at the beginning of the expression.
There are two exceptions to this; '-daystart' and '-follow' have
different effects depending on where in the command line they appear.
This can be confusing, so it's best to keep them at the beginning, too.

Many of the primaries take arguments, which immediately follow them
in the next command line argument to 'find'. Some arguments are file
names, patterns, or other strings; others are numbers. Numeric
arguments can be specified as

'+N'
for greater than N,
'-N'
for less than N,
'N'
for exactly N.

File: find.info, Node: Finding Files, Next: Actions, Prev: Introduction, Up: Top

2 Finding Files
***************

By default, 'find' prints to the standard output the names of the files
that match the given criteria. *Note Actions::, for how to get more
information about the matching files.

* Menu:

* Name::
* Links::
* Time::
* Size::
* Type::
* Owner::
* Mode Bits::
* Contents::
* Directories::
* Filesystems::
* Combining Primaries With Operators::

File: find.info, Node: Name, Next: Links, Up: Finding Files

2.1 Name
========

Here are ways to search for files whose name matches a certain pattern.
*Note Shell Pattern Matching::, for a description of the PATTERN
arguments to these tests.

Each of these tests has a case-sensitive version and a
case-insensitive version, whose name begins with 'i'. In a
case-insensitive comparison, the patterns 'fo*' and 'F??' match the file
names 'Foo', 'FOO', 'foo', 'fOo', etc.

* Menu:

* Base Name Patterns::
* Full Name Patterns::
* Fast Full Name Search::
* Shell Pattern Matching:: Wildcards used by these programs.

File: find.info, Node: Base Name Patterns, Next: Full Name Patterns, Up: Name

2.1.1 Base Name Patterns
------------------------

-- Test: -name pattern
-- Test: -iname pattern
True if the base of the file name (the path with the leading
directories removed) matches shell pattern PATTERN. For '-iname',
the match is case-insensitive.(1) To ignore a whole directory
tree, use '-prune' (*note Directories::). As an example, to find
Texinfo source files in '/usr/local/doc':

find /usr/local/doc -name '*.texi'

Notice that the wildcard must be enclosed in quotes in order to
protect it from expansion by the shell.

As of findutils version 4.2.2, patterns for '-name' and '-iname'
will match a file name with a leading '.'. For example the command
'find /tmp -name \*bar' will match the file '/tmp/.foobar'. Braces
within the pattern ('{}') are not considered to be special (that
is, 'find . -name 'foo{1,2}'' matches a file named 'foo{1,2}', not
the files 'foo1' and 'foo2'.

Because the leading directories are removed, the file names
considered for a match with '-name' will never include a slash, so
'-name a/b' will never match anything (you probably need to use
'-path' instead).

---------- Footnotes ----------

(1) Because we need to perform case-insensitive matching, the GNU
fnmatch implementation is always used; if the C library includes the GNU
implementation, we use that and otherwise we use the one from gnulib

File: find.info, Node: Full Name Patterns, Next: Fast Full Name Search, Prev: Base Name Patterns, Up: Name

2.1.2 Full Name Patterns
------------------------

-- Test: -path pattern
-- Test: -wholename pattern
True if the entire file name, starting with the command line
argument under which the file was found, matches shell pattern
PATTERN. To ignore a whole directory tree, use '-prune' rather
than checking every file in the tree (*note Directories::). The
"entire file name" as used by 'find' starts with the starting-point
specified on the command line, and is not converted to an absolute
pathname, so for example 'cd /; find tmp -wholename /tmp' will
never match anything.

Find compares the '-path' argument with the concatenation of a
directory name and the base name of the file it's considering.
Since the concatenation will never end with a slash, '-path'
arguments ending in '/' will match nothing (except perhaps a start
point specified on the command line).

The name '-wholename' is GNU-specific, but '-path' is more
portable; it is supported by HP-UX 'find' and is part of the POSIX
2008 standard.

-- Test: -ipath pattern
-- Test: -iwholename pattern
These tests are like '-wholename' and '-path', but the match is
case-insensitive.

In the context of the tests '-path', '-wholename', '-ipath' and
'-wholename', a "full path" is the name of all the directories traversed
from 'find''s start point to the file being tested, followed by the base
name of the file itself. These paths are often not absolute paths; for
example

$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir -p foo/bar/baz
$ find foo -path foo/bar -print
foo/bar
$ find foo -path /tmp/foo/bar -print
$ find /tmp/foo -path /tmp/foo/bar -print
/tmp/foo/bar

Notice that the second 'find' command prints nothing, even though
'/tmp/foo/bar' exists and was examined by 'find'.

Unlike file name expansion on the command line, a '*' in the pattern
will match both '/' and leading dots in file names:

$ find . -path '*f'
./quux/bar/baz/f
$ find . -path '*/*config'
./quux/bar/baz/.config

-- Test: -regex expr
-- Test: -iregex expr
True if the entire file name matches regular expression EXPR. This
is a match on the whole path, not a search. For example, to match
a file named './fubar3', you can use the regular expression
'.*bar.' or '.*b.*3', but not 'f.*r3'. *Note Syntax of Regular
Expressions: (emacs)Regexps, for a description of the syntax of
regular expressions. For '-iregex', the match is case-insensitive.

As for '-path', the candidate file name never ends with a slash, so
regular expressions which only match something that ends in slash
will always fail.

There are several varieties of regular expressions; by default this
test uses POSIX basic regular expressions, but this can be changed
with the option '-regextype'.

-- Option: -regextype name
This option controls the variety of regular expression syntax
understood by the '-regex' and '-iregex' tests. This option is
positional; that is, it only affects regular expressions which
occur later in the command line. If this option is not given, GNU
Emacs regular expressions are assumed. Currently-implemented types
are

'emacs'
Regular expressions compatible with GNU Emacs; this is also
the default behaviour if this option is not used.
'posix-awk'
Regular expressions compatible with the POSIX awk command (not
GNU awk)
'posix-basic'
POSIX Basic Regular Expressions.
'posix-egrep'
Regular expressions compatible with the POSIX egrep command
'posix-extended'
POSIX Extended Regular Expressions

*note Regular Expressions:: for more information on the regular
expression dialects understood by GNU findutils.

File: find.info, Node: Fast Full Name Search, Next: Shell Pattern Matching, Prev: Full Name Patterns, Up: Name

2.1.3 Fast Full Name Search
---------------------------

To search for files by name without having to actually scan the
directories on the disk (which can be slow), you can use the 'locate'
program. For each shell pattern you give it, 'locate' searches one or
more databases of file names and displays the file names that contain
the pattern. *Note Shell Pattern Matching::, for details about shell
patterns.

If a pattern is a plain string - it contains no metacharacters -
'locate' displays all file names in the database that contain that
string. If a pattern contains metacharacters, 'locate' only displays
file names that match the pattern exactly. As a result, patterns that
contain metacharacters should usually begin with a '*', and will most
often end with one as well. The exceptions are patterns that are
intended to explicitly match the beginning or end of a file name.

If you only want 'locate' to match against the last component of the
file names (the "base name" of the files) you can use the '--basename'
option. The opposite behaviour is the default, but can be selected
explicitly by using the option '--wholename'.

The command
locate PATTERN

is almost equivalent to
find DIRECTORIES -name PATTERN

where DIRECTORIES are the directories for which the file name
databases contain information. The differences are that the 'locate'
information might be out of date, and that 'locate' handles wildcards in
the pattern slightly differently than 'find' (*note Shell Pattern
Matching::).

The file name databases contain lists of files that were on the
system when the databases were last updated. The system administrator
can choose the file name of the default database, the frequency with
which the databases are updated, and the directories for which they
contain entries.

Here is how to select which file name databases 'locate' searches.
The default is system-dependent. At the time this document was
generated, the default was '/usr/local/var/locatedb'.

'--database=PATH'
'-d PATH'
Instead of searching the default file name database, search the
file name databases in PATH, which is a colon-separated list of
database file names. You can also use the environment variable
'LOCATE_PATH' to set the list of database files to search. The
option overrides the environment variable if both are used.

GNU 'locate' can read file name databases generated by the 'slocate'
package. However, these generally contain a list of all the files on
the system, and so when using this database, 'locate' will produce
output only for files which are accessible to you. *Note Invoking
locate::, for a description of the '--existing' option which is used to
do this.

The 'updatedb' program can also generate database in a format
compatible with 'slocate'. *Note Invoking updatedb::, for a description
of its '--dbformat' and '--output' options.

File: find.info, Node: Shell Pattern Matching, Prev: Fast Full Name Search, Up: Name

2.1.4 Shell Pattern Matching
----------------------------

'find' and 'locate' can compare file names, or parts of file names, to
shell patterns. A "shell pattern" is a string that may contain the
following special characters, which are known as "wildcards" or
"metacharacters".

You must quote patterns that contain metacharacters to prevent the
shell from expanding them itself. Double and single quotes both work;
so does escaping with a backslash.

'*'
Matches any zero or more characters.

'?'
Matches any one character.

'[STRING]'
Matches exactly one character that is a member of the string
STRING. This is called a "character class". As a shorthand,
STRING may contain ranges, which consist of two characters with a
dash between them. For example, the class '[a-z0-9_]' matches a
lowercase letter, a number, or an underscore. You can negate a
class by placing a '!' or '^' immediately after the opening
bracket. Thus, '[^A-Z@]' matches any character except an uppercase
letter or an at sign.

'\'
Removes the special meaning of the character that follows it. This
works even in character classes.

In the 'find' tests that do shell pattern matching ('-name',
'-wholename', etc.), wildcards in the pattern will match a '.' at the
beginning of a file name. This is also the case for 'locate'. Thus,
'find -name '*macs'' will match a file named '.emacs', as will 'locate
'*macs''.

Slash characters have no special significance in the shell pattern
matching that 'find' and 'locate' do, unlike in the shell, in which
wildcards do not match them. Therefore, a pattern 'foo*bar' can match a
file name 'foo3/bar', and a pattern './sr*sc' can match a file name
'./src/misc'.

If you want to locate some files with the 'locate' command but don't
need to see the full list you can use the '--limit' option to see just a
small number of results, or the '--count' option to display only the
total number of matches.

File: find.info, Node: Links, Next: Time, Prev: Name, Up: Finding Files

2.2 Links
=========

There are two ways that files can be linked together. "Symbolic links"
are a special type of file whose contents are a portion of the name of
another file. "Hard links" are multiple directory entries for one file;
the file names all have the same index node ("inode") number on the
disk.

* Menu:

* Symbolic Links::
* Hard Links::

File: find.info, Node: Symbolic Links, Next: Hard Links, Up: Links

2.2.1 Symbolic Links
--------------------

Symbolic links are names that reference other files. GNU 'find' will
handle symbolic links in one of two ways; firstly, it can dereference
the links for you - this means that if it comes across a symbolic link,
it examines the file that the link points to, in order to see if it
matches the criteria you have specified. Secondly, it can check the
link itself in case you might be looking for the actual link. If the
file that the symbolic link points to is also within the directory
hierarchy you are searching with the 'find' command, you may not see a
great deal of difference between these two alternatives.

By default, 'find' examines symbolic links themselves when it finds
them (and, if it later comes across the linked-to file, it will examine
that, too). If you would prefer 'find' to dereference the links and
examine the file that each link points to, specify the '-L' option to
'find'. You can explicitly specify the default behaviour by using the
'-P' option. The '-H' option is a half-way-between option which ensures
that any symbolic links listed on the command line are dereferenced, but
other symbolic links are not.

Symbolic links are different from "hard links" in the sense that you
need permission to search the directories in the linked-to file name to
dereference the link. This can mean that even if you specify the '-L'
option, 'find' may not be able to determine the properties of the file
that the link points to (because you don't have sufficient permission).
In this situation, 'find' uses the properties of the link itself. This
also occurs if a symbolic link exists but points to a file that is
missing.

The options controlling the behaviour of 'find' with respect to links
are as follows:

'-P'
'find' does not dereference symbolic links at all. This is the
default behaviour. This option must be specified before any of the
file names on the command line.
'-H'
'find' does not dereference symbolic links (except in the case of
file names on the command line, which are dereferenced). If a
symbolic link cannot be dereferenced, the information for the
symbolic link itself is used. This option must be specified before
any of the file names on the command line.
'-L'
'find' dereferences symbolic links where possible, and where this
is not possible it uses the properties of the symbolic link itself.
This option must be specified before any of the file names on the
command line. Use of this option also implies the same behaviour
as the '-noleaf' option. If you later use the '-H' or '-P'
options, this does not turn off '-noleaf'.

Actions that can cause symbolic links to become broken while 'find'
is executing (for example '-delete') can give rise to confusing
behaviour. Take for example the command line 'find -L . -type d
-delete'. This will delete empty directories. If a subtree
includes only directories and symbolic links to directoires, this
command may still not successfully delete it, since deletion of the
target of the symbolic link will cause the symbolic link to become
broken and '-type d' is false for broken symbolic links.

'-follow'
This option forms part of the "expression" and must be specified
after the file names, but it is otherwise equivalent to '-L'. The
'-follow' option affects only those tests which appear after it on
the command line. This option is deprecated. Where possible, you
should use '-L' instead.

The following differences in behaviour occur when the '-L' option is
used:

* 'find' follows symbolic links to directories when searching
directory trees.
* '-lname' and '-ilname' always return false (unless they happen to
match broken symbolic links).
* '-type' reports the types of the files that symbolic links point
to. This means that in combination with '-L', '-type l' will be
true only for broken symbolic links. To check for symbolic links
when '-L' has been specified, use '-xtype l'.
* Implies '-noleaf' (*note Directories::).

If the '-L' option or the '-H' option is used, the file names used as
arguments to '-newer', '-anewer', and '-cnewer' are dereferenced and the
timestamp from the pointed-to file is used instead (if possible -
otherwise the timestamp from the symbolic link is used).

-- Test: -lname pattern
-- Test: -ilname pattern
True if the file is a symbolic link whose contents match shell
pattern PATTERN. For '-ilname', the match is case-insensitive.
*Note Shell Pattern Matching::, for details about the PATTERN
argument. If the '-L' option is in effect, this test will always
return false for symbolic links unless they are broken. So, to
list any symbolic links to 'sysdep.c' in the current directory and
its subdirectories, you can do:

find . -lname '*sysdep.c'

File: find.info, Node: Hard Links, Prev: Symbolic Links, Up: Links

2.2.2 Hard Links
----------------

Hard links allow more than one name to refer to the same file. To find
all the names which refer to the same file as NAME, use '-samefile
NAME'. If you are not using the '-L' option, you can confine your
search to one filesystem using the '-xdev' option. This is useful
because hard links cannot point outside a single filesystem, so this can
cut down on needless searching.

If the '-L' option is in effect, and NAME is in fact a symbolic link,
the symbolic link will be dereferenced. Hence you are searching for
other links (hard or symbolic) to the file pointed to by NAME. If '-L'
is in effect but NAME is not itself a symbolic link, other symbolic
links to the file NAME will be matched.

You can also search for files by inode number. This can occasionally
be useful in diagnosing problems with filesystems for example, because
'fsck' tends to print inode numbers. Inode numbers also occasionally
turn up in log messages for some types of software, and are used to
support the 'ftok()' library function.

You can learn a file's inode number and the number of links to it by
running 'ls -li' or 'find -ls'.

You can search for hard links to inode number NUM by using '-inum
NUM'. If there are any filesystem mount points below the directory
where you are starting the search, use the '-xdev' option unless you are
also using the '-L' option. Using '-xdev' this saves needless
searching, since hard links to a file must be on the same filesystem.
*Note Filesystems::.

-- Test: -samefile NAME
File is a hard link to the same inode as NAME. If the '-L' option
is in effect, symbolic links to the same file as NAME points to are
also matched.

-- Test: -inum n
File has inode number N. The '+' and '-' qualifiers also work,
though these are rarely useful. Much of the time it is easier to
use '-samefile' rather than this option.

You can also search for files that have a certain number of links,
with '-links'. Directories normally have at least two hard links; their
'.' entry is the second one. If they have subdirectories, each of those
also has a hard link called '..' to its parent directory. The '.' and
'..' directory entries are not normally searched unless they are
mentioned on the 'find' command line.

-- Test: -links n
File has N hard links.

-- Test: -links +n
File has more than N hard links.

-- Test: -links -n
File has fewer than N hard links.

File: find.info, Node: Time, Next: Size, Prev: Links, Up: Finding Files

2.3 Time
========

Each file has three time stamps, which record the last time that certain
operations were performed on the file:

1. access (read the file's contents)
2. change the status (modify the file or its attributes)
3. modify (change the file's contents)

Some systems also provide a timestamp that indicates when a file was
_created_. For example, the UFS2 filesystem under NetBSD-3.1 records
the _birth time_ of each file. This information is also available under
other versions of BSD and some versions of Cygwin. However, even on
systems which support file birth time, files may exist for which this
information was not recorded (for example, UFS1 file systems simply do
not contain this information).

You can search for files whose time stamps are within a certain age
range, or compare them to other time stamps.

* Menu:

* Age Ranges::
* Comparing Timestamps::

File: find.info, Node: Age Ranges, Next: Comparing Timestamps, Up: Time

2.3.1 Age Ranges
----------------

These tests are mainly useful with ranges ('+N' and '-N').

-- Test: -atime n
-- Test: -ctime n
-- Test: -mtime n
True if the file was last accessed (or its status changed, or it
was modified) N*24 hours ago. The number of 24-hour periods since
the file's timestamp is always rounded down; therefore 0 means
"less than 24 hours ago", 1 means "between 24 and 48 hours ago",
and so forth. Fractional values are supported but this only really
makes sense for the case where ranges ('+N' and '-N') are used.

-- Test: -amin n
-- Test: -cmin n
-- Test: -mmin n
True if the file was last accessed (or its status changed, or it
was modified) N minutes ago. These tests provide finer granularity
of measurement than '-atime' et al., but rounding is done in a
similar way (again, fractions are supported). For example, to list
files in '/u/bill' that were last read from 2 to 6 minutes ago:

find /u/bill -amin +2 -amin -6

-- Option: -daystart
Measure times from the beginning of today rather than from 24 hours
ago. So, to list the regular files in your home directory that
were modified yesterday, do

find ~/ -daystart -type f -mtime 1

The '-daystart' option is unlike most other options in that it has
an effect on the way that other tests are performed. The affected
tests are '-amin', '-cmin', '-mmin', '-atime', '-ctime' and
'-mtime'. The '-daystart' option only affects the behaviour of any
tests which appear after it on the command line.

File: find.info, Node: Comparing Timestamps, Prev: Age Ranges, Up: Time

2.3.2 Comparing Timestamps
--------------------------

-- Test: -newerXY reference
Succeeds if timestamp 'X' of the file being considered is newer
than timestamp 'Y' of the file 'reference'. The letters 'X' and
'Y' can be any of the following letters:

'a'
Last-access time of 'reference'
'B'
Birth time of 'reference' (when this is not known, the test
cannot succeed)
'c'
Last-change time of 'reference'
'm'
Last-modification time of 'reference'
't'
The 'reference' argument is interpreted as a literal time,
rather than the name of a file. *Note Date input formats::,
for a description of how the timestamp is understood. Tests
of the form '-newerXt' are valid but tests of the form
'-newertY' are not.

For example the test '-newerac /tmp/foo' succeeds for all files
which have been accessed more recently than '/tmp/foo' was changed.
Here 'X' is 'a' and 'Y' is 'c'.

Not all files have a known birth time. If 'Y' is 'b' and the birth
time of 'reference' is not available, 'find' exits with an
explanatory error message. If 'X' is 'b' and we do not know the
birth time the file currently being considered, the test simply
fails (that is, it behaves like '-false' does).

Some operating systems (for example, most implementations of Unix)
do not support file birth times. Some others, for example
NetBSD-3.1, do. Even on operating systems which support file birth
times, the information may not be available for specific files.
For example, under NetBSD, file birth times are supported on UFS2
file systems, but not UFS1 file systems.

There are two ways to list files in '/usr' modified after February 1
of the current year. One uses '-newermt':

find /usr -newermt "Feb 1"

The other way of doing this works on the versions of find before
4.3.3:

touch -t 02010000 /tmp/stamp$$
find /usr -newer /tmp/stamp$$
rm -f /tmp/stamp$$

-- Test: -anewer file
-- Test: -cnewer file
-- Test: -newer file
True if the file was last accessed (or its status changed, or it
was modified) more recently than FILE was modified. These tests
are affected by '-follow' only if '-follow' comes before them on
the command line. *Note Symbolic Links::, for more information on
'-follow'. As an example, to list any files modified since
'/bin/sh' was last modified:

find . -newer /bin/sh

-- Test: -used n
True if the file was last accessed N days after its status was last
changed. Useful for finding files that are not being used, and
could perhaps be archived or removed to save disk space.

File: find.info, Node: Size, Next: Type, Prev: Time, Up: Finding Files

2.4 Size
========

-- Test: -size n[bckwMG]
True if the file uses N units of space, rounding up. The units are
512-byte blocks by default, but they can be changed by adding a
one-character suffix to N:

'b'
512-byte blocks (never 1024)
'c'
bytes
'k'
kilobytes (1024 bytes)
'w'
2-byte words
'M'
Megabytes (units of 1048576 bytes)
'G'
Gigabytes (units of 1073741824 bytes)

The 'b' suffix always considers blocks to be 512 bytes. This is
not affected by the setting (or non-setting) of the
'POSIXLY_CORRECT' environment variable. This behaviour is
different from the behaviour of the '-ls' action). If you want to
use 1024-byte units, use the 'k' suffix instead.

The number can be prefixed with a '+' or a '-'. A plus sign
indicates that the test should succeed if the file uses at least N
units of storage (a common use of this test) and a minus sign
indicates that the test should succeed if the file uses less than N
units of storage. There is no '=' prefix, because that's the
default anyway.

The size does not count indirect blocks, but it does count blocks
in sparse files that are not actually allocated. In other words,
it's consistent with the result you get for 'ls -l' or 'wc -c'.
This handling of sparse files differs from the output of the '%k'
and '%b' format specifiers for the '-printf' predicate.

-- Test: -empty
True if the file is empty and is either a regular file or a
directory. This might help determine good candidates for deletion.
This test is useful with '-depth' (*note Directories::) and
'-delete' (*note Single File::).

File: find.info, Node: Type, Next: Owner, Prev: Size, Up: Finding Files

2.5 Type
========

-- Test: -type c
True if the file is of type C:

'b'
block (buffered) special
'c'
character (unbuffered) special
'd'
directory
'p'
named pipe (FIFO)
'f'
regular file
'l'
symbolic link; if '-L' is in effect, this is true only for
broken symbolic links. If you want to search for symbolic
links when '-L' is in effect, use '-xtype' instead of '-type'.
's'
socket
'D'
door (Solaris)

-- Test: -xtype c
This test behaves the same as '-type' unless the file is a symbolic
link. If the file is a symbolic link, the result is as follows (in
the table below, 'X' should be understood to represent any letter
except 'l'):

''-P -xtype l''
True if the symbolic link is broken
''-P -xtype X''
True if the (ultimate) target file is of type 'X'.
''-L -xtype l''
Always true
''-L -xtype X''
False unless the symbolic link is broken

In other words, for symbolic links, '-xtype' checks the type of the
file that '-type' does not check.

The '-H' option also affects the behaviour of '-xtype'. When '-H'
is in effect, '-xtype' behaves as if '-L' had been specified when
examining files listed on the command line, and as if '-P' had been
specified otherwise. If neither '-H' nor '-L' was specified,
'-xtype' behaves as if '-P' had been specified.

*Note Symbolic Links::, for more information on '-follow' and '-L'.

File: find.info, Node: Owner, Next: Mode Bits, Prev: Type, Up: Finding Files

2.6 Owner
=========

-- Test: -user uname
-- Test: -group gname
True if the file is owned by user UNAME (belongs to group GNAME).
A numeric ID is allowed.

-- Test: -uid n
-- Test: -gid n
True if the file's numeric user ID (group ID) is N. These tests
support ranges ('+N' and '-N'), unlike '-user' and '-group'.

-- Test: -nouser
-- Test: -nogroup
True if no user corresponds to the file's numeric user ID (no group
corresponds to the numeric group ID). These cases usually mean that
the files belonged to users who have since been removed from the
system. You probably should change the ownership of such files to
an existing user or group, using the 'chown' or 'chgrp' program.

File: find.info, Node: Mode Bits, Next: Contents, Prev: Owner, Up: Finding Files

2.7 File Mode Bits
==================

*Note File Permissions::, for information on how file mode bits are
structured and how to specify them.

Four tests determine what users can do with files. These are
'-readable', '-writable', '-executable' and '-perm'. The first three
tests ask the operating system if the current user can perform the
relevant operation on a file, while '-perm' just examines the file's
mode. The file mode may give a misleading impression of what the user
can actually do, because the file may have an access control list, or
exist on a read-only filesystem, for example. Of these four tests
though, only '-perm' is specified by the POSIX standard.

The '-readable', '-writable' and '-executable' tests are implemented
via the 'access' system call. This is implemented within the operating
system itself. If the file being considered is on an NFS filesystem,
the remote system may allow or forbid read or write operations for
reasons of which the NFS client cannot take account. This includes
user-ID mapping, either in the general sense or the more restricted
sense in which remote superusers are treated by the NFS server as if
they are the local user 'nobody' on the NFS server.

None of the tests in this section should be used to verify that a
user is authorised to perform any operation (on the file being tested or
any other file) because of the possibility of a race condition. That
is, the situation may change between the test and an action being taken
on the basis of the result of that test.

-- Test: -readable
True if the file can be read by the invoking user.

-- Test: -writable
True if the file can be written by the invoking user. This is an
in-principle check, and other things may prevent a successful write
operation; for example, the filesystem might be full.

-- Test: -executable
True if the file can be executed/searched by the invoking user.

-- Test: -perm pmode

True if the file's mode bits match PMODE, which can be either a
symbolic or numeric MODE (*note File Permissions::) optionally
prefixed by '-' or '/'.

A PMODE that starts with neither '-' nor '/' matches if MODE
exactly matches the file mode bits. (To avoid confusion with an
obsolete GNU extension, MODE must not start with a '+' immediately
followed by an octal digit.)

A PMODE that starts with '-' matches if _all_ the file mode bits
set in MODE are set for the file; bits not set in MODE are ignored.

A PMODE that starts with '/' matches if _any_ of the file mode bits
set in MODE are set for the file; bits not set in MODE are ignored.
This is a GNU extension.

If you don't use the '/' or '-' form with a symbolic mode string,
you may have to specify a rather complex mode string. For example
'-perm g=w' will only match files that have mode 0020 (that is,
ones for which group write permission is the only file mode bit
set). It is more likely that you will want to use the '/' or '-'
forms, for example '-perm -g=w', which matches any file with group
write permission.

'-perm 664'
Match files that have read and write permission for their
owner, and group, but that the rest of the world can read but
not write to. Do not match files that meet these criteria but
have other file mode bits set (for example if someone can
execute/search the file).

'-perm -664'
Match files that have read and write permission for their
owner, and group, but that the rest of the world can read but
not write to, without regard to the presence of any extra file
mode bits (for example the executable bit). This matches a
file with mode 0777, for example.

'-perm /222'
Match files that are writable by somebody (their owner, or
their group, or anybody else).

'-perm /022'
Match files that are writable by either their owner or their
group. The files don't have to be writable by both the owner
and group to be matched; either will do.

'-perm /g+w,o+w'
As above.

'-perm /g=w,o=w'
As above.

'-perm -022'
Match files that are writable by both their owner and their
group.

'-perm -444 -perm /222 ! -perm /111'
Match files that are readable for everybody, have at least one
write bit set (i.e., somebody can write to them), but that
cannot be executed/searched by anybody. Note that in some
shells the '!' must be escaped;.

'-perm -a+r -perm /a+w ! -perm /a+x'
As above.

'-perm -g+w,o+w'
As above.

Warning: If you specify '-perm /000' or '-perm /mode' where
the symbolic mode 'mode' has no bits set, the test matches all
files. Versions of GNU 'find' prior to 4.3.3 matched no files
in this situation.

-- Test: -context pattern
True if file's SELinux context matches the pattern PATTERN. The
pattern uses shell glob matching.

This predicate is supported only on 'find' versions compiled with
SELinux support and only when SELinux is enabled.

File: find.info, Node: Contents, Next: Directories, Prev: Mode Bits, Up: Finding Files

2.8 Contents
============

To search for files based on their contents, you can use the 'grep'
program. For example, to find out which C source files in the current
directory contain the string 'thing', you can do:

grep -l thing *.[ch]

If you also want to search for the string in files in subdirectories,
you can combine 'grep' with 'find' and 'xargs', like this:

find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -l thing

The '-l' option causes 'grep' to print only the names of files that
contain the string, rather than the lines that contain it. The string
argument ('thing') is actually a regular expression, so it can contain
metacharacters. This method can be refined a little by using the '-r'
option to make 'xargs' not run 'grep' if 'find' produces no output, and
using the 'find' action '-print0' and the 'xargs' option '-0' to avoid
misinterpreting files whose names contain spaces:

find . -name '*.[ch]' -print0 | xargs -r -0 grep -l thing

For a fuller treatment of finding files whose contents match a
pattern, see the manual page for 'grep'.

File: find.info, Node: Directories, Next: Filesystems, Prev: Contents, Up: Finding Files

2.9 Directories
===============

Here is how to control which directories 'find' searches, and how it
searches them. These two options allow you to process a horizontal
slice of a directory tree.

-- Option: -maxdepth levels
Descend at most LEVELS (a non-negative integer) levels of
directories below the command line arguments. '-maxdepth 0' means
only apply the tests and actions to the command line arguments.

-- Option: -mindepth levels
Do not apply any tests or actions at levels less than LEVELS (a
non-negative integer). '-mindepth 1' means process all files
except the command line arguments.

-- Option: -depth
Process each directory's contents before the directory itself.
Doing this is a good idea when producing lists of files to archive
with 'cpio' or 'tar'. If a directory does not have write
permission for its owner, its contents can still be restored from
the archive since the directory's permissions are restored after
its contents.

-- Option: -d
This is a deprecated synonym for '-depth', for compatibility with
Mac OS X, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The '-depth' option is a POSIX
feature, so it is better to use that.

-- Action: -prune
If the file is a directory, do not descend into it. The result is
true. For example, to skip the directory 'src/emacs' and all files
and directories under it, and print the names of the other files
found:

find . -wholename './src/emacs' -prune -o -print

The above command will not print './src/emacs' among its list of
results. This however is not due to the effect of the '-prune'
action (which only prevents further descent, it doesn't make sure
we ignore that item). Instead, this effect is due to the use of
'-o'. Since the left hand side of the "or" condition has succeeded
for './src/emacs', it is not necessary to evaluate the
right-hand-side ('-print') at all for this particular file. If you
wanted to print that directory name you could use either an extra
'-print' action:

find . -wholename './src/emacs' -prune -print -o -print

or use the comma operator:

find . -wholename './src/emacs' -prune , -print

If the '-depth' option is in effect, the subdirectories will have
already been visited in any case. Hence '-prune' has no effect in
this case.

Because '-delete' implies '-depth', using '-prune' in combination
with '-delete' may well result in the deletion of more files than
you intended.

-- Action: -quit
Exit immediately (with return value zero if no errors have
occurred). This is different to '-prune' because '-prune' only
applies to the contents of pruned directories, while '-quit' simply
makes 'find' stop immediately. No child processes will be left
running, but no more files specified on the command line will be
processed. For example, 'find /tmp/foo /tmp/bar -print -quit' will
print only '/tmp/foo'. Any command lines which have been built by
'-exec ... \+' or '-execdir ... \+' are invoked before the program
is exited.

-- Option: -noleaf
Do not optimize by assuming that directories contain 2 fewer
subdirectories than their hard link count. This option is needed
when searching filesystems that do not follow the Unix
directory-link convention, such as CD-ROM or MS-DOS filesystems or
AFS volume mount points. Each directory on a normal Unix
filesystem has at least 2 hard links: its name and its '.' entry.
Additionally, its subdirectories (if any) each have a '..' entry
linked to that directory. When 'find' is examining a directory,
after it has statted 2 fewer subdirectories than the directory's
link count, it knows that the rest of the entries in the directory
are non-directories ("leaf" files in the directory tree). If only
the files' names need to be examined, there is no need to stat
them; this gives a significant increase in search speed.

-- Option: -ignore_readdir_race
If a file disappears after its name has been read from a directory
but before 'find' gets around to examining the file with 'stat',
don't issue an error message. If you don't specify this option, an
error message will be issued. This option can be useful in system
scripts (cron scripts, for example) that examine areas of the
filesystem that change frequently (mail queues, temporary
directories, and so forth), because this scenario is common for
those sorts of directories. Completely silencing error messages
from 'find' is undesirable, so this option neatly solves the
problem. There is no way to search one part of the filesystem with
this option on and part of it with this option off, though. When
this option is turned on and find discovers that one of the
start-point files specified on the command line does not exist, no
error message will be issued.

-- Option: -noignore_readdir_race
This option reverses the effect of the '-ignore_readdir_race'
option.

File: find.info, Node: Filesystems, Next: Combining Primaries With Operators, Prev: Directories, Up: Finding Files

2.10 Filesystems
================

A "filesystem" is a section of a disk, either on the local host or
mounted from a remote host over a network. Searching network
filesystems can be slow, so it is common to make 'find' avoid them.

There are two ways to avoid searching certain filesystems. One way
is to tell 'find' to only search one filesystem:

-- Option: -xdev
-- Option: -mount
Don't descend directories on other filesystems. These options are
synonyms.

The other way is to check the type of filesystem each file is on, and
not descend directories that are on undesirable filesystem types:

-- Test: -fstype type
True if the file is on a filesystem of type TYPE. The valid
filesystem types vary among different versions of Unix; an
incomplete list of filesystem types that are accepted on some
version of Unix or another is:
ext2 ext3 proc sysfs ufs 4.2 4.3 nfs tmp mfs S51K S52K
You can use '-printf' with the '%F' directive to see the types of
your filesystems. The '%D' directive shows the device number.
*Note Print File Information::. '-fstype' is usually used with
'-prune' to avoid searching remote filesystems (*note
Directories::).

File: find.info, Node: Combining Primaries With Operators, Prev: Filesystems, Up: Finding Files

2.11 Combining Primaries With Operators
=======================================

Operators build a complex expression from tests and actions. The
operators are, in order of decreasing precedence:

'( EXPR )'
Force precedence. True if EXPR is true.

'! EXPR'
'-not EXPR'
True if EXPR is false. In some shells, it is necessary to protect
the '!' from shell interpretation by quoting it.

'EXPR1 EXPR2'
'EXPR1 -a EXPR2'
'EXPR1 -and EXPR2'
And; EXPR2 is not evaluated if EXPR1 is false.

'EXPR1 -o EXPR2'
'EXPR1 -or EXPR2'
Or; EXPR2 is not evaluated if EXPR1 is true.

'EXPR1 , EXPR2'
List; both EXPR1 and EXPR2 are always evaluated. True if EXPR2 is
true. The value of EXPR1 is discarded. This operator lets you do
multiple independent operations on one traversal, without depending
on whether other operations succeeded. The two operations EXPR1
and EXPR2 are not always fully independent, since EXPR1 might have
side effects like touching or deleting files, or it might use
'-prune' which would also affect EXPR2.

'find' searches the directory tree rooted at each file name by
evaluating the expression from left to right, according to the rules of
precedence, until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for
'-and', true for '-or'), at which point 'find' moves on to the next file
name.

There are two other tests that can be useful in complex expressions:

-- Test: -true
Always true.

-- Test: -false
Always false.

File: find.info, Node: Actions, Next: Databases, Prev: Finding Files, Up: Top

3 Actions
*********

There are several ways you can print information about the files that
match the criteria you gave in the 'find' expression. You can print the
information either to the standard output or to a file that you name.
You can also execute commands that have the file names as arguments.
You can use those commands as further filters to select files.

* Menu:

* Print File Name::
* Print File Information::
* Run Commands::
* Delete Files::
* Adding Tests::

File: find.info, Node: Print File Name, Next: Print File Information, Up: Actions

3.1 Print File Name
===================

-- Action: -print
True; print the entire file name on the standard output, followed
by a newline. If there is the faintest possibility that one of the
files for which you are searching might contain a newline, you
should use '-print0' instead.

-- Action: -fprint file
True; print the entire file name into file FILE, followed by a
newline. If FILE does not exist when 'find' is run, it is created;
if it does exist, it is truncated to 0 bytes. The named output
file is always created, even if no output is sent to it. The file
names '/dev/stdout' and '/dev/stderr' are handled specially; they
refer to the standard output and standard error output,
respectively.

If there is the faintest possibility that one of the files for
which you are searching might contain a newline, you should use
'-fprint0' instead.

File: find.info, Node: Print File Information, Next: Run Commands, Prev: Print File Name, Up: Actions

3.2 Print File Information
==========================

-- Action: -ls
True; list the current file in 'ls -dils' format on the standard
output. The output looks like this:

204744 17 -rw-r--r-- 1 djm staff 17337 Nov 2 1992 ./lwall-quotes

The fields are:

1. The inode number of the file. *Note Hard Links::, for how to
find files based on their inode number.

2. the number of blocks in the file. The block counts are of 1K
blocks, unless the environment variable 'POSIXLY_CORRECT' is
set, in which case 512-byte blocks are used. *Note Size::,
for how to find files based on their size.

3. The file's type and file mode bits. The type is shown as a
dash for a regular file; for other file types, a letter like
for '-type' is used (*note Type::). The file mode bits are
read, write, and execute/search for the file's owner, its
group, and other users, respectively; a dash means the
permission is not granted. *Note File Permissions::, for more
details about file permissions. *Note Mode Bits::, for how to
find files based on their file mode bits.

4. The number of hard links to the file.

5. The user who owns the file.

6. The file's group.

7. The file's size in bytes.

8. The date the file was last modified.

9. The file's name. '-ls' quotes non-printable characters in the
file names using C-like backslash escapes. This may change
soon, as the treatment of unprintable characters is harmonised
for '-ls', '-fls', '-print', '-fprint', '-printf' and
'-fprintf'.

-- Action: -fls file
True; like '-ls' but write to FILE like '-fprint' (*note Print File
Name::). The named output file is always created, even if no
output is sent to it.

-- Action: -printf format
True; print FORMAT on the standard output, interpreting '\' escapes
and '%' directives (more details in the following sections).

Field widths and precisions can be specified as with the 'printf' C
function. Format flags (like '#' for example) may not work as you
expect because many of the fields, even numeric ones, are printed
with %s. Numeric flags which are affected in this way include 'G',
'U', 'b', 'D', 'k' and 'n'. This difference in behaviour means
though that the format flag '-' will work; it forces left-alignment
of the field. Unlike '-print', '-printf' does not add a newline at
the end of the string. If you want a newline at the end of the
string, add a '\n'.

As an example, an approximate equivalent of '-ls' with
null-terminated filenames can be achieved with this '-printf'
format:

find -printf "%i %4k %M %3n %-8u %-8g %8s %T+ %p\n->%l\0" | cat

A practical reason for doing this would be to get literal filenames
in the output, instead of '-ls''s backslash-escaped names. (Using
'cat' here prevents this happening for the '%p' format specifier;
*note Unusual Characters in File Names::). This format also
outputs a uniform timestamp format.

As for symlinks, the format above outputs the symlink target on a
second line, following '\n->'. There is nothing following the
arrow for non-symlinks. Another approach, for complete
consistency, would be to '-fprintf' the symlinks into a separate
file, so they too can be null-terminated.

-- Action: -fprintf file format
True; like '-printf' but write to FILE like '-fprint' (*note Print
File Name::). The output file is always created, even if no output
is ever sent to it.

* Menu:

* Escapes::
* Format Directives::
* Time Formats::
* Formatting Flags::

File: find.info, Node: Escapes, Next: Format Directives, Up: Print File Information

3.2.1 Escapes
-------------

The escapes that '-printf' and '-fprintf' recognise are:

'\a'
Alarm bell.
'\b'
Backspace.
'\c'
Stop printing from this format immediately and flush the output.
'\f'
Form feed.
'\n'
Newline.
'\r'
Carriage return.
'\t'
Horizontal tab.
'\v'
Vertical tab.
'\\'
A literal backslash ('\').
'\0'
ASCII NUL.
'\NNN'
The character whose ASCII code is NNN (octal).

A '\' character followed by any other character is treated as an
ordinary character, so they both are printed, and a warning message is
printed to the standard error output (because it was probably a typo).

File: find.info, Node: Format Directives, Next: Time Formats, Prev: Escapes, Up: Print File Information

3.2.2 Format Directives
-----------------------

'-printf' and '-fprintf' support the following format directives to
print information about the file being processed. The C 'printf'
function, field width and precision specifiers are supported, as applied
to string (%s) types. That is, you can specify "minimum field
width"."maximum field width" for each directive. Format flags (like '#'
for example) may not work as you expect because many of the fields, even
numeric ones, are printed with %s. The format flag '-' does work; it
forces left-alignment of the field.

'%%' is a literal percent sign. *Note Reserved and Unknown
Directives::, for a description of how format directives not mentioned
below are handled.

A '%' at the end of the format argument causes undefined behaviour
since there is no following character. In some locales, it may hide
your door keys, while in others it may remove the final page from the
novel you are reading.

* Menu:

* Name Directives::
* Ownership Directives::
* Size Directives::
* Location Directives::
* Time Directives::
* Other Directives::
* Reserved and Unknown Directives::

File: find.info, Node: Name Directives, Next: Ownership Directives, Up: Format Directives

3.2.2.1 Name Directives
.......................

'%p'
File's name (not the absolute path name, but the name of the file
as it was encountered by 'find' - that is, as a relative path from
one of the starting points).
'%f'
File's name with any leading directories removed (only the last
element).
'%h'
Leading directories of file's name (all but the last element and
the slash before it). If the file's name contains no slashes (for
example because it was named on the command line and is in the
current working directory), then "%h" expands to ".". This
prevents "%h/%f" expanding to "/foo", which would be surprising and
probably not desirable.
'%P'
File's name with the name of the command line argument under which
it was found removed from the beginning.
'%H'
Command line argument under which file was found.

File: find.info, Node: Ownership Directives, Next: Size Directives, Prev: Name Directives, Up: Format Directives

3.2.2.2 Ownership Directives
............................

'%g'
File's group name, or numeric group ID if the group has no name.
'%G'
File's numeric group ID.
'%u'
File's user name, or numeric user ID if the user has no name.
'%U'
File's numeric user ID.
'%m'
File's mode bits (in octal). If you always want to have a leading
zero on the number, use the '#' format flag, for example '%#m'.

The file mode bit numbers used are the traditional Unix numbers,
which will be as expected on most systems, but if your system's
file mode bit layout differs from the traditional Unix semantics,
you will see a difference between the mode as printed by '%m' and
the mode as it appears in 'struct stat'.

'%M'
File's type and mode bits (in symbolic form, as for 'ls'). This
directive is supported in findutils 4.2.5 and later.

File: find.info, Node: Size Directives, Next: Location Directives, Prev: Ownership Directives, Up: Format Directives

3.2.2.3 Size Directives
.......................

'%k'
The amount of disk space used for this file in 1K blocks. Since
disk space is allocated in multiples of the filesystem block size
this is usually greater than %s/1024, but it can also be smaller if
the file is a sparse file (that is, it has "holes").
'%b'
The amount of disk space used for this file in 512-byte blocks.
Since disk space is allocated in multiples of the filesystem block
size this is usually greater than %s/512, but it can also be
smaller if the file is a sparse file (that is, it has "holes").
'%s'
File's size in bytes.
'%S'
File's sparseness. This is calculated as '(BLOCKSIZE*st_blocks /
st_size)'. The exact value you will get for an ordinary file of a
certain length is system-dependent. However, normally sparse files
will have values less than 1.0, and files which use indirect blocks
and have few holes may have a value which is greater than 1.0. The
value used for BLOCKSIZE is system-dependent, but is usually 512
bytes. If the file size is zero, the value printed is undefined.
On systems which lack support for st_blocks, a file's sparseness is
assumed to be 1.0.

File: find.info, Node: Location Directives, Next: Time Directives, Prev: Size Directives, Up: Format Directives

3.2.2.4 Location Directives
...........................

'%d'
File's depth in the directory tree (depth below a file named on the
command line, not depth below the root directory). Files named on
the command line have a depth of 0. Subdirectories immediately
below them have a depth of 1, and so on.
'%D'
The device number on which the file exists (the 'st_dev' field of
'struct stat'), in decimal.
'%F'
Type of the filesystem the file is on; this value can be used for
'-fstype' (*note Directories::).
'%l'
Object of symbolic link (empty string if file is not a symbolic
link).
'%i'
File's inode number (in decimal).
'%n'
Number of hard links to file.
'%y'
Type of the file as used with '-type'. If the file is a symbolic
link, 'l' will be printed.
'%Y'
Type of the file as used with '-type'. If the file is a symbolic
link, it is dereferenced. If the file is a broken symbolic link,
'N' is printed.

File: find.info, Node: Time Directives, Next: Other Directives, Prev: Location Directives, Up: Format Directives

3.2.2.5 Time Directives
.......................

Some of these directives use the C 'ctime' function. Its output depends
on the current locale, but it typically looks like

Wed Nov 2 00:42:36 1994

'%a'
File's last access time in the format returned by the C 'ctime'
function.
'%AK'
File's last access time in the format specified by K (*note Time
Formats::).
'%c'
File's last status change time in the format returned by the C
'ctime' function.
'%CK'
File's last status change time in the format specified by K (*note
Time Formats::).
'%t'
File's last modification time in the format returned by the C
'ctime' function.
'%TK'
File's last modification time in the format specified by K (*note
Time Formats::).

File: find.info, Node: Other Directives, Next: Reserved and Unknown Directives, Prev: Time Directives, Up: Format Directives

3.2.2.6 Other Directives
........................

'%Z'
File's SELinux context, or empty string if the file has no SELinux
context.

File: find.info, Node: Reserved and Unknown Directives, Prev: Other Directives, Up: Format Directives

3.2.2.7 Reserved and Unknown Directives
.......................................

The '%(', '%{' and '%[' format directives, with or without field with
and precision specifications, are reserved for future use. Don't use
them and don't rely on current experiment to predict future behaviour.
To print '(', simply use '(' rather than '%('. Likewise for '{' and
'['.

Similarly, a '%' character followed by any other unrecognised
character (i.e., not a known directive or 'printf' field width and
precision specifier), is discarded (but the unrecognised character is
printed), and a warning message is printed to the standard error output
(because it was probably a typo). Don't rely on this behaviour, because
other directives may be added in the future.

File: find.info, Node: Time Formats, Next: Formatting Flags, Prev: Format Directives, Up: Print File Information

3.2.3 Time Formats
------------------

Below are the formats for the directives '%A', '%C', and '%T', which
print the file's timestamps. Some of these formats might not be
available on all systems, due to differences in the C 'strftime'
function between systems.

* Menu:

* Time Components::
* Date Components::
* Combined Time Formats::

File: find.info, Node: Time Components, Next: Date Components, Up: Time Formats

3.2.3.1 Time Components
.......................

The following format directives print single components of the time.

'H'
hour (00..23)
'I'
hour (01..12)
'k'
hour ( 0..23)
'l'
hour ( 1..12)
'p'
locale's AM or PM
'Z'
time zone (e.g., EDT), or nothing if no time zone is determinable
'M'
minute (00..59)
'S'
second (00..61). There is a fractional part.
'@'
seconds since Jan. 1, 1970, 00:00 GMT, with fractional part.

The fractional part of the seconds field is of indeterminate length
and precision. That is, the length of the fractional part of the
seconds field will in general vary between findutils releases and
between systems. This means that it is unwise to assume that field has
any specific length. The length of this field is not usually a guide to
the precision of timestamps in the underlying file system.

File: find.info, Node: Date Components, Next: Combined Time Formats, Prev: Time Components, Up: Time Formats

3.2.3.2 Date Components
.......................

The following format directives print single components of the date.

'a'
locale's abbreviated weekday name (Sun..Sat)
'A'
locale's full weekday name, variable length (Sunday..Saturday)
'b'
'h'
locale's abbreviated month name (Jan..Dec)
'B'
locale's full month name, variable length (January..December)
'm'
month (01..12)
'd'
day of month (01..31)
'w'
day of week (0..6)
'j'
day of year (001..366)
'U'
week number of year with Sunday as first day of week (00..53)
'W'
week number of year with Monday as first day of week (00..53)
'Y'
year (1970...)
'y'
last two digits of year (00..99)

File: find.info, Node: Combined Time Formats, Prev: Date Components, Up: Time Formats

3.2.3.3 Combined Time Formats
.............................

The following format directives print combinations of time and date
components.

'r'
time, 12-hour (hh:mm:ss [AP]M)
'T'
time, 24-hour (hh:mm:ss)
'X'
locale's time representation (H:M:S)
'c'
locale's date and time in ctime format (Sat Nov 04 12:02:33 EST
1989). This format does not include any fractional part in the
seconds field.
'D'
date (mm/dd/yy)
'x'
locale's date representation (mm/dd/yy)
'+'
Date and time, separated by '+', for example
'2004-04-28+22:22:05.0000000000'. The time is given in the current
timezone (which may be affected by setting the TZ environment
variable). This is a GNU extension. The seconds field includes a
fractional part.

File: find.info, Node: Formatting Flags, Prev: Time Formats, Up: Print File Information

3.2.4 Formatting Flags
----------------------

The '%m' and '%d' directives support the '#', '0' and '+' flags, but the
other directives do not, even if they print numbers. Numeric directives
that do not support these flags include

'G', 'U', 'b', 'D', 'k' and 'n'.

All fields support the format flag '-', which makes fields
left-aligned. That is, if the field width is greater than the actual
contents of the field, the requisite number of spaces are printed after
the field content instead of before it.

File: find.info, Node: Run Commands, Next: Delete Files, Prev: Print File Information, Up: Actions

3.3 Run Commands
================

You can use the list of file names created by 'find' or 'locate' as
arguments to other commands. In this way you can perform arbitrary
actions on the files.

* Menu:

* Single File::
* Multiple Files::
* Querying::

File: find.info, Node: Single File, Next: Multiple Files, Up: Run Commands

3.3.1 Single File
-----------------

Here is how to run a command on one file at a time.

-- Action: -execdir command ;
Execute COMMAND; true if COMMAND returns zero. 'find' takes all
arguments after '-execdir' to be part of the command until an
argument consisting of ';' is reached. It replaces the string '{}'
by the current file name being processed everywhere it occurs in
the command. Both of these constructions need to be escaped (with
a '\') or quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell. The
command is executed in the directory which 'find' was searching at
the time the action was executed (that is, {} will expand to a file
in the local directory).

For example, to compare each C header file in or below the current
directory with the file '/tmp/master':

find . -name '*.h' -execdir diff -u '{}' /tmp/master ';'

If you use '-execdir', you must ensure that the '$PATH' variable
contains only absolute directory names. Having an empty element in
'$PATH' or explicitly including '.' (or any other non-absolute name) is
insecure. GNU find will refuse to run if you use '-execdir' and it
thinks your '$PATH' setting is insecure. For example:

'/bin:/usr/bin:'
Insecure; empty path element (at the end)
':/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin'
Insecure; empty path element (at the start)
'/bin:/usr/bin::/usr/local/bin'
Insecure; empty path element (two colons in a row)
'/bin:/usr/bin:.:/usr/local/bin'
Insecure; '.' is a path element ('.' is not an absolute file name)
'/bin:/usr/bin:sbin:/usr/local/bin'
Insecure; 'sbin' is not an absolute file name
'/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin'
Secure (if you control the contents of those directories and any
access to them)

Another similar option, '-exec' is supported, but is less secure.
*Note Security Considerations::, for a discussion of the security
problems surrounding '-exec'.

-- Action: -exec command ;
This insecure variant of the '-execdir' action is specified by
POSIX. Like '-execdir command ;' it is true if zero is returned by
COMMAND. The main difference is that the command is executed in
the directory from which 'find' was invoked, meaning that '{}' is
expanded to a relative path starting with the name of one of the
starting directories, rather than just the basename of the matched
file.

While some implementations of 'find' replace the '{}' only where it
appears on its own in an argument, GNU 'find' replaces '{}'
wherever it appears.

File: find.info, Node: Multiple Files, Next: Querying, Prev: Single File, Up: Run Commands

3.3.2 Multiple Files
--------------------

Sometimes you need to process files one at a time. But usually this is
not necessary, and, it is faster to run a command on as many files as
possible at a time, rather than once per file. Doing this saves on the
time it takes to start up the command each time.

The '-execdir' and '-exec' actions have variants that build command
lines containing as many matched files as possible.

-- Action: -execdir command {} +
This works as for '-execdir command ;', except that the result is
always true, and the '{}' at the end of the command is expanded to
a list of names of matching files. This expansion is done in such
a way as to avoid exceeding the maximum command line length
available on the system. Only one '{}' is allowed within the
command, and it must appear at the end, immediately before the '+'.
A '+' appearing in any position other than immediately after '{}'
is not considered to be special (that is, it does not terminate the
command).

-- Action: -exec command {} +
This insecure variant of the '-execdir' action is specified by
POSIX. The main difference is that the command is executed in the
directory from which 'find' was invoked, meaning that '{}' is
expanded to a relative path starting with the name of one of the
starting directories, rather than just the basename of the matched
file. The result is always true.

Before 'find' exits, any partially-built command lines are executed.
This happens even if the exit was caused by the '-quit' action.
However, some types of error (for example not being able to invoke
'stat()' on the current directory) can cause an immediate fatal exit.
In this situation, any partially-built command lines will not be invoked
(this prevents possible infinite loops).

At first sight, it looks like the list of filenames to be processed
can only be at the end of the command line, and that this might be a
problem for some commands ('cp' and 'rsync' for example).

However, there is a slightly obscure but powerful workaround for this
problem which takes advantage of the behaviour of 'sh -c':

find startpoint -tests ... -exec sh -c 'scp "$@" remote:/dest' sh {} +

In the example above, the filenames we want to work on need to occur
on the 'scp' command line before the name of the destination. We use
the shell to invoke the command 'scp "$@" remote:/dest' and the shell
expands '"$@"' to the list of filenames we want to process.

Another, but less secure, way to run a command on more than one file
at once, is to use the 'xargs' command, which is invoked like this:

xargs [OPTION...] [COMMAND [INITIAL-ARGUMENTS]]

'xargs' normally reads arguments from the standard input. These
arguments are delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or
single quotes or a backslash) or newlines. It executes the COMMAND (the
default is 'echo') one or more times with any INITIAL-ARGUMENTS followed
by arguments read from standard input. Blank lines on the standard
input are ignored. If the '-L' option is in use, trailing blanks
indicate that 'xargs' should consider the following line to be part of
this one.

Instead of blank-delimited names, it is safer to use 'find -print0'
or 'find -fprint0' and process the output by giving the '-0' or '--null'
option to GNU 'xargs', GNU 'tar', GNU 'cpio', or 'perl'. The 'locate'
command also has a '-0' or '--null' option which does the same thing.

You can use shell command substitution (backquotes) to process a list
of arguments, like this:

grep -l sprintf `find $HOME -name '*.c' -print`

However, that method produces an error if the length of the '.c' file
names exceeds the operating system's command line length limit. 'xargs'
avoids that problem by running the command as many times as necessary
without exceeding the limit:

find $HOME -name '*.c' -print | xargs grep -l sprintf

However, if the command needs to have its standard input be a
terminal ('less', for example), you have to use the shell command
substitution method or use the '--arg-file' option of 'xargs'.

The 'xargs' command will process all its input, building command
lines and executing them, unless one of the commands exits with a status
of 255 (this will cause xargs to issue an error message and stop) or it
reads a line contains the end of file string specified with the '--eof'
option.

* Menu:

* Unsafe File Name Handling::
* Safe File Name Handling::
* Unusual Characters in File Names::
* Limiting Command Size::
* Controlling Parallelism::
* Interspersing File Names::

File: find.info, Node: Unsafe File Name Handling, Next: Safe File Name Handling, Up: Multiple Files

3.3.2.1 Unsafe File Name Handling
.................................

Because file names can contain quotes, backslashes, blank characters,
and even newlines, it is not safe to process them using 'xargs' in its
default mode of operation. But since most files' names do not contain
blanks, this problem occurs only infrequently. If you are only
searching through files that you know have safe names, then you need not
be concerned about it.

Error messages issued by 'find' and 'locate' quote unusual characters
in file names in order to prevent unwanted changes in the terminal's
state.

In many applications, if 'xargs' botches processing a file because
its name contains special characters, some data might be lost. The
importance of this problem depends on the importance of the data and
whether anyone notices the loss soon enough to correct it. However,
here is an extreme example of the problems that using blank-delimited
names can cause. If the following command is run daily from 'cron',
then any user can remove any file on the system:

find / -name '#*' -atime +7 -print | xargs rm

For example, you could do something like this:

eg$ echo > '#
vmunix'

and then 'cron' would delete '/vmunix', if it ran 'xargs' with '/' as
its current directory.

To delete other files, for example '/u/joeuser/.plan', you could do
this:

eg$ mkdir '#
'
eg$ cd '#
'
eg$ mkdir u u/joeuser u/joeuser/.plan'
'
eg$ echo > u/joeuser/.plan'
/#foo'
eg$ cd ..
eg$ find . -name '#*' -print | xargs echo
./# ./# /u/joeuser/.plan /#foo

File: find.info, Node: Safe File Name Handling, Next: Unusual Characters in File Names, Prev: Unsafe File Name Handling, Up: Multiple Files

3.3.2.2 Safe File Name Handling
...............................

Here is how to make 'find' output file names so that they can be used by
other programs without being mangled or misinterpreted. You can process
file names generated this way by giving the '-0' or '--null' option to
GNU 'xargs', GNU 'tar', GNU 'cpio', or 'perl'.

-- Action: -print0
True; print the entire file name on the standard output, followed
by a null character.

-- Action: -fprint0 file
True; like '-print0' but write to FILE like '-fprint' (*note Print
File Name::). The output file is always created.

As of findutils version 4.2.4, the 'locate' program also has a
'--null' option which does the same thing. For similarity with 'xargs',
the short form of the option '-0' can also be used.

If you want to be able to handle file names safely but need to run
commands which want to be connected to a terminal on their input, you
can use the '--arg-file' option to 'xargs' like this:

find / -name xyzzy -print0 > list
xargs --null --arg-file=list munge

The example above runs the 'munge' program on all the files named
'xyzzy' that we can find, but 'munge''s input will still be the terminal
(or whatever the shell was using as standard input). If your shell has
the "process substitution" feature '<(...)', you can do this in just one
step:

xargs --null --arg-file=<(find / -name xyzzy -print0) munge

File: find.info, Node: Unusual Characters in File Names, Next: Limiting Command Size, Prev: Safe File Name Handling, Up: Multiple Files

3.3.2.3 Unusual Characters in File Names
........................................

As discussed above, you often need to be careful about how the names of
files are handled by 'find' and other programs. If the output of 'find'
is not going to another program but instead is being shown on a
terminal, this can still be a problem. For example, some character
sequences can reprogram the function keys on some terminals. *Note
Security Considerations::, for a discussion of other security problems
relating to 'find'.

Unusual characters are handled differently by various actions, as
described below.

'-print0'
'-fprint0'
Always print the exact file name, unchanged, even if the output is
going to a terminal.
'-ok'
'-okdir'
Always print the exact file name, unchanged. This will probably
change in a future release.
'-ls'
'-fls'
Unusual characters are always escaped. White space, backslash, and
double quote characters are printed using C-style escaping (for
example '\f', '\"'). Other unusual characters are printed using an
octal escape. Other printable characters (for '-ls' and '-fls'
these are the characters between octal 041 and 0176) are printed
as-is.
'-printf'
'-fprintf'
If the output is not going to a terminal, it is printed as-is.
Otherwise, the result depends on which directive is in use:

%D, %F, %H, %Y, %y
These expand to values which are not under control of files'
owners, and so are printed as-is.
%a, %b, %c, %d, %g, %G, %i, %k, %m, %M, %n, %s, %t, %u, %U
These have values which are under the control of files' owners
but which cannot be used to send arbitrary data to the
terminal, and so these are printed as-is.
%f, %h, %l, %p, %P
The output of these directives is quoted if the output is
going to a terminal. The setting of the 'LC_CTYPE'
environment variable is used to determine which characters
need to be quoted.

This quoting is performed in the same way as for GNU 'ls'.
This is not the same quoting mechanism as the one used for
'-ls' and 'fls'. If you are able to decide what format to use
for the output of 'find' then it is normally better to use
'\0' as a terminator than to use newline, as file names can
contain white space and newline characters.
'-print'
'-fprint'
Quoting is handled in the same way as for the '%p' directive of
'-printf' and '-fprintf'. If you are using 'find' in a script or
in a situation where the matched files might have arbitrary names,
you should consider using '-print0' instead of '-print'.

The 'locate' program quotes and escapes unusual characters in file
names in the same way as 'find''s '-print' action.

The behaviours described above may change soon, as the treatment of
unprintable characters is harmonised for '-ls', '-fls', '-print',
'-fprint', '-printf' and '-fprintf'.

File: find.info, Node: Limiting Command Size, Next: Controlling Parallelism, Prev: Unusual Characters in File Names, Up: Multiple Files

3.3.2.4 Limiting Command Size
.............................

'xargs' gives you control over how many arguments it passes to the
command each time it executes it. By default, it uses up to 'ARG_MAX' -
2k, or 128k, whichever is smaller, characters per command. It uses as
many lines and arguments as fit within that limit. The following
options modify those values.

'--no-run-if-empty'
'-r'
If the standard input does not contain any nonblanks, do not run
the command. By default, the command is run once even if there is
no input. This option is a GNU extension.

'--max-lines[=MAX-LINES]'
'-L MAX-LINES'
'-l[MAX-LINES]'
Use at most MAX-LINES nonblank input lines per command line;
MAX-LINES defaults to 1 if omitted; omitting the argument is not
allowed in the case of the '-L' option. Trailing blanks cause an
input line to be logically continued on the next input line, for
the purpose of counting the lines. Implies '-x'. The preferred
name for this option is '-L' as this is specified by POSIX.

'--max-args=MAX-ARGS'
'-n MAX-ARGS'
Use at most MAX-ARGS arguments per command line. Fewer than
MAX-ARGS arguments will be used if the size (see the '-s' option)
is exceeded, unless the '-x' option is given, in which case 'xargs'
will exit.

'--max-chars=MAX-CHARS'
'-s MAX-CHARS'
Use at most MAX-CHARS characters per command line, including the
command initial arguments and the terminating nulls at the ends of
the argument strings. If you specify a value for this option which
is too large or small, a warning message is printed and the
appropriate upper or lower limit is used instead. You can use
'--show-limits' option to understand the command-line limits
applying to 'xargs' and how this is affected by any other options.
The POSIX limits shown when you do this have already been adjusted
to take into account the size of your environment variables.

The largest allowed value is system-dependent, and is calculated as
the argument length limit for exec, less the size of your
environment, less 2048 bytes of headroom. If this value is more
than 128KiB, 128Kib is used as the default value; otherwise, the
default value is the maximum.

File: find.info, Node: Controlling Parallelism, Next: Interspersing File Names, Prev: Limiting Command Size, Up: Multiple Files

3.3.2.5 Controlling Parallelism
...............................

Normally, 'xargs' runs one command at a time. This is called "serial"
execution; the commands happen in a series, one after another. If you'd
like 'xargs' to do things in "parallel", you can ask it to do so, either
when you invoke it, or later while it is running. Running several
commands at one time can make the entire operation go more quickly, if
the commands are independent, and if your system has enough resources to
handle the load. When parallelism works in your application, 'xargs'
provides an easy way to get your work done faster.

'--max-procs=MAX-PROCS'
'-P MAX-PROCS'
Run up to MAX-PROCS processes at a time; the default is 1. If
MAX-PROCS is 0, 'xargs' will run as many processes as possible at a
time. Use the '-n', '-s', or '-L' option with '-P'; otherwise
chances are that the command will be run only once.

For example, suppose you have a directory tree of large image files
and a 'makeallsizes' script that takes a single file name and creates
various sized images from it (thumbnail-sized, web-page-sized,
printer-sized, and the original large file). The script is doing enough
work that it takes significant time to run, even on a single image. You
could run:

find originals -name '*.jpg' | xargs -1 makeallsizes

This will run 'makeallsizes FILENAME' once for each '.jpg' file in
the 'originals' directory. However, if your system has two central
processors, this script will only keep one of them busy. Instead, you
could probably finish in about half the time by running:

find originals -name '*.jpg' | xargs -1 -P 2 makeallsizes

'xargs' will run the first two commands in parallel, and then
whenever one of them terminates, it will start another one, until the
entire job is done.

The same idea can be generalized to as many processors as you have
handy. It also generalizes to other resources besides processors. For
example, if 'xargs' is running commands that are waiting for a response
from a distant network connection, running a few in parallel may reduce
the overall latency by overlapping their waiting time.

If you are running commands in parallel, you need to think about how
they should arbitrate access to any resources that they share. For
example, if more than one of them tries to print to stdout, the ouptut
will be produced in an indeterminate order (and very likely mixed up)
unless the processes collaborate in some way to prevent this. Using
some kind of locking scheme is one way to prevent such problems. In
general, using a locking scheme will help ensure correct output but
reduce performance. If you don't want to tolerate the performance
difference, simply arrange for each process to produce a separate output
file (or otherwise use separate resources).

'xargs' also allows you to "turn up" or "turn down" its parallelism
in the middle of a run. Suppose you are keeping your four-processor
system busy for hours, processing thousands of images using '-P 4'.
Now, in the middle of the run, you or someone else wants you to reduce
your load on the system, so that something else will run faster. If you
interrupt 'xargs', your job will be half-done, and it may take
significant manual work to resume it only for the remaining images. If
you suspend 'xargs' using your shell's job controls (e.g. 'control-Z'),
then it will get no work done while suspended.

Find out the process ID of the 'xargs' process, either from your
shell or with the 'ps' command. After you send it the signal 'SIGUSR2',
'xargs' will run one fewer command in parallel. If you send it the
signal 'SIGUSR1', it will run one more command in parallel. For
example:

shell$ xargs <allimages -1 -P 4 makeallsizes &
[4] 27643
... at some later point ...
shell$ kill -USR2 27643
shell$ kill -USR2 %4

The first 'kill' command will cause 'xargs' to wait for two commands
to terminate before starting the next command (reducing the parallelism
from 4 to 3). The second 'kill' will reduce it from 3 to 2. ('%4'
works in some shells as a shorthand for the process ID of the background
job labeled '[4]'.)

Similarly, if you started a long 'xargs' job without parallelism, you
can easily switch it to start running two commands in parallel by
sending it a 'SIGUSR1'.

'xargs' will never terminate any existing commands when you ask it to
run fewer processes. It merely waits for the excess commands to finish.
If you ask it to run more commands, it will start the next one
immediately (if it has more work to do). If the degree of parallelism
is already 1, sending 'SIGUSR2' will have no further effect (since
'--max-procs=0' means that there should be no limit on the number of
processes to run).

There is an implementation-defined limit on the number of processes.
This limit is shown with 'xargs --show-limits'. The limit is at least
127 on all systems (and on the author's system it is 2147483647).

If you send several identical signals quickly, the operating system
does not guarantee that each of them will be delivered to 'xargs'. This
means that you can't rapidly increase or decrease the parallelism by
more than one command at a time. You can avoid this problem by sending
a signal, observing the result, then sending the next one; or merely by
delaying for a few seconds between signals (unless your system is very
heavily loaded).

Whether or not parallel execution will work well for you depends on
the nature of the commmand you are running in parallel, on the
configuration of the system on which you are running the command, and on
the other work being done on the system at the time.

File: find.info, Node: Interspersing File Names, Prev: Controlling Parallelism, Up: Multiple Files

3.3.2.6 Interspersing File Names
................................

'xargs' can insert the name of the file it is processing between
arguments you give for the command. Unless you also give options to
limit the command size (*note Limiting Command Size::), this mode of
operation is equivalent to 'find -exec' (*note Single File::).

'--replace[=REPLACE-STR]'
'-I REPLACE-STR'
'-i REPLACE-STR'
Replace occurrences of REPLACE-STR in the initial arguments with
names read from the input. Also, unquoted blanks do not terminate
arguments; instead, the input is split at newlines only. For the
'-i' option, if REPLACE-STR is omitted for '--replace' or '-i', it
defaults to '{}' (like for 'find -exec'). Implies '-x' and '-l 1'.
'-i' is deprecated in favour of '-I'. As an example, to sort each
file in the 'bills' directory, leaving the output in that file name
with '.sorted' appended, you could do:

find bills -type f | xargs -I XX sort -o XX.sorted XX

The equivalent command using 'find -execdir' is:

find bills -type f -execdir sort -o '{}.sorted' '{}' ';'

When you use the '-I' option, each line read from the input is
buffered internally. This means that there is an upper limit on the
length of input line that 'xargs' will accept when used with the '-I'
option. To work around this limitation, you can use the '-s' option to
increase the amount of buffer space that xargs uses, and you can also
use an extra invocation of xargs to ensure that very long lines do not
occur. For example:

somecommand | xargs -s 50000 echo | xargs -I '{}' -s 100000 rm '{}'

Here, the first invocation of 'xargs' has no input line length limit
because it doesn't use the '-I' option. The second invocation of
'xargs' does have such a limit, but we have ensured that it never
encounters a line which is longer than it can handle.

This is not an ideal solution. Instead, the '-I' option should not
impose a line length limit (apart from any limit imposed by the
operating system) and so one might consider this limitation to be a bug.
A better solution would be to allow 'xargs -I' to automatically move to
a larger value for the '-s' option when this is needed.

This sort of problem doesn't occur with the output of 'find' because
it emits just one filename per line.

File: find.info, Node: Querying, Prev: Multiple Files, Up: Run Commands

3.3.3 Querying
--------------

To ask the user whether to execute a command on a single file, you can
use the 'find' primary '-okdir' instead of '-execdir', and the 'find'
primary '-ok' instead of '-exec':

-- Action: -okdir command ;
Like '-execdir' (*note Single File::), but ask the user first. If
the user does not agree to run the command, just return false.
Otherwise, run it, with standard input redirected from '/dev/null'.

The response to the prompt is matched against a pair of regular
expressions to determine if it is a yes or no response. These
regular expressions are obtained from the system ('nl_langinfo'
items YESEXPR and NOEXPR are used) if the 'POSIXLY_CORRECT'
environment variable is set and the system has such patterns
available. Otherwise, 'find''s message translations are used. In
either case, the 'LC_MESSAGES' environment variable will determine
the regular expressions used to determine if the answer is
affirmative or negative. The interpretation of the regular
expressions themselves will be affected by the environment
variables 'LC_CTYPE' (character classes) and 'LC_COLLATE'
(character ranges and equivalence classes).

-- Action: -ok command ;
This insecure variant of the '-okdir' action is specified by POSIX.
The main difference is that the command is executed in the
directory from which 'find' was invoked, meaning that '{}' is
expanded to a relative path starting with the name of one of the
starting directories, rather than just the basename of the matched
file. If the command is run, its standard input is redirected from
'/dev/null'.

When processing multiple files with a single command, to query the
user you give 'xargs' the following option. When using this option, you
might find it useful to control the number of files processed per
invocation of the command (*note Limiting Command Size::).

'--interactive'
'-p'
Prompt the user about whether to run each command line and read a
line from the terminal. Only run the command line if the response
starts with 'y' or 'Y'. Implies '-t'.

File: find.info, Node: Delete Files, Next: Adding Tests, Prev: Run Commands, Up: Actions

3.4 Delete Files
================

-- Action: -delete
Delete files or directories; true if removal succeeded. If the
removal failed, an error message is issued.

The use of the '-delete' action on the command line automatically
turns on the '-depth' option (*note find Expressions::). This can
be surprising if you were previously just testing with '-print', so
it is usually best to remember to use '-depth' explicitly.

If '-delete' fails, 'find''s exit status will be nonzero (when it
eventually exits).

File: find.info, Node: Adding Tests, Prev: Delete Files, Up: Actions

3.5 Adding Tests
================

You can test for file attributes that none of the 'find' builtin tests
check. To do this, use 'xargs' to run a program that filters a list of
files printed by 'find'. If possible, use 'find' builtin tests to pare
down the list, so the program run by 'xargs' has less work to do. The
tests builtin to 'find' will likely run faster than tests that other
programs perform.

For reasons of efficiency it is often useful to limit the number of
times an external program has to be run. For this reason, it is often a
good idea to implement "extended" tests by using 'xargs'.

For example, here is a way to print the names of all of the
unstripped binaries in the '/usr/local' directory tree. Builtin tests
avoid running 'file' on files that are not regular files or are not
executable.

find /usr/local -type f -perm /a=x | xargs file |
grep 'not stripped' | cut -d: -f1

The 'cut' program removes everything after the file name from the output
of 'file'.

However, using 'xargs' can present important security problems (*note
Security Considerations::). These can be avoided by using '-execdir'.
The '-execdir' action is also a useful way of putting your own test in
the middle of a set of other tests or actions for 'find' (for example,
you might want to use '-prune').

To place a special test somewhere in the middle of a 'find'
expression, you can use '-execdir' (or, less securely, '-exec') to run a
program that performs the test. Because '-execdir' evaluates to the
exit status of the executed program, you can use a program (which can be
a shell script) that tests for a special attribute and make it exit with
a true (zero) or false (non-zero) status. It is a good idea to place
such a special test _after_ the builtin tests, because it starts a new
process which could be avoided if a builtin test evaluates to false.

Here is a shell script called 'unstripped' that checks whether its
argument is an unstripped binary file:

#! /bin/sh
file "$1" | grep -q "not stripped"

This script relies on the shell exiting with the status of the last
command in the pipeline, in this case 'grep'. The 'grep' command exits
with a true status if it found any matches, false if not. Here is an
example of using the script (assuming it is in your search path). It
lists the stripped executables (and shell scripts) in the file 'sbins'
and the unstripped ones in 'ubins'.

find /usr/local -type f -perm /a=x \
$ -execdir unstripped '{}' \; -fprint ubins -o -fprint sbins $

File: find.info, Node: Databases, Next: File Permissions, Prev: Actions, Up: Top

4 File Name Databases
*********************

The file name databases used by 'locate' contain lists of files that
were in particular directory trees when the databases were last updated.
The file name of the default database is determined when 'locate' and
'updatedb' are configured and installed. The frequency with which the
databases are updated and the directories for which they contain entries
depend on how often 'updatedb' is run, and with which arguments.

You can obtain some statistics about the databases by using 'locate
--statistics'.

* Menu:

* Database Locations::
* Database Formats::
* Newline Handling::

File: find.info, Node: Database Locations, Next: Database Formats, Up: Databases

4.1 Database Locations
======================

There can be multiple file name databases. Users can select which
databases 'locate' searches using the 'LOCATE_PATH' environment variable
or a command line option. The system administrator can choose the file
name of the default database, the frequency with which the databases are
updated, and the directories for which they contain entries. File name
databases are updated by running the 'updatedb' program, typically
nightly.

In networked environments, it often makes sense to build a database
at the root of each filesystem, containing the entries for that
filesystem. 'updatedb' is then run for each filesystem on the
fileserver where that filesystem is on a local disk, to prevent
thrashing the network.

*Note Invoking updatedb::, for the description of the options to
'updatedb'. These options can be used to specify which directories are
indexed by each database file.

The default location for the locate database depends on how findutils
is built, but the findutils installation accompanying this manual uses
the default location '/usr/local/var/locatedb'.

If no database exists at '/usr/local/var/locatedb' but the user did
not specify where to look (by using '-d' or setting 'LOCATE_PATH'), then
'locate' will also check for a "secure" database in
'/var/lib/slocate/slocate.db'.

File: find.info, Node: Database Formats, Next: Newline Handling, Prev: Database Locations, Up: Databases

4.2 Database Formats
====================

The file name databases contain lists of files that were in particular
directory trees when the databases were last updated. The file name
database format changed starting with GNU 'locate' version 4.0 to allow
machines with different byte orderings to share the databases.

GNU 'locate' can read both the old and new database formats.
However, old versions of 'locate' (on other Unix systems, or GNU
'locate' before version 4.0) produce incorrect results if run against a
database in something other than the old format.

Support for the old database format will eventually be discontinued,
first in 'updatedb' and later in 'locate'.

If you run 'locate --statistics', the resulting summary indicates the
type of each 'locate' database. You select which database format
'updatedb' will use with the '--dbformat' option.

* Menu:

* LOCATE02 Database Format::
* Sample LOCATE02 Database::
* slocate Database Format::
* Old Database Format::

File: find.info, Node: LOCATE02 Database Format, Next: Sample LOCATE02 Database, Up: Database Formats

4.2.1 LOCATE02 Database Format
------------------------------

'updatedb' runs a program called 'frcode' to "front-compress" the list
of file names, which reduces the database size by a factor of 4 to 5.
Front-compression (also known as incremental encoding) works as follows.

The database entries are a sorted list (case-insensitively, for
users' convenience). Since the list is sorted, each entry is likely to
share a prefix (initial string) with the previous entry. Each database
entry begins with an offset-differential count byte, which is the
additional number of characters of prefix of the preceding entry to use
beyond the number that the preceding entry is using of its predecessor.
(The counts can be negative.) Following the count is a null-terminated
ASCII remainder - the part of the name that follows the shared prefix.

If the offset-differential count is larger than can be stored in a
byte (+/-127), the byte has the value 0x80 and the count follows in a
2-byte word, with the high byte first (network byte order).

Every database begins with a dummy entry for a file called
'LOCATE02', which 'locate' checks for to ensure that the database file
has the correct format; it ignores the entry in doing the search.

Databases cannot be concatenated together, even if the first (dummy)
entry is trimmed from all but the first database. This is because the
offset-differential count in the first entry of the second and following
databases will be wrong.

In the output of 'locate --statistics', the new database format is
referred to as 'LOCATE02'.

File: find.info, Node: Sample LOCATE02 Database, Next: slocate Database Format, Prev: LOCATE02 Database Format, Up: Database Formats

4.2.2 Sample LOCATE02 Database
------------------------------

Sample input to 'frcode':

/usr/src
/usr/src/cmd/aardvark.c
/usr/src/cmd/armadillo.c
/usr/tmp/zoo

Length of the longest prefix of the preceding entry to share:

0 /usr/src
8 /cmd/aardvark.c
14 rmadillo.c
5 tmp/zoo

Output from 'frcode', with trailing nulls changed to newlines and
count bytes made printable:

0 LOCATE02
0 /usr/src
8 /cmd/aardvark.c
6 rmadillo.c
-9 tmp/zoo

(6 = 14 - 8, and -9 = 5 - 14)

File: find.info, Node: slocate Database Format, Next: Old Database Format, Prev: Sample LOCATE02 Database, Up: Database Formats

4.2.3 slocate Database Format
-----------------------------

The 'slocate' program uses a database format similar to, but not quite
the same as, GNU 'locate'. The first byte of the database specifies its
"security level". If the security level is 0, 'slocate' will read,
match and print filenames on the basis of the information in the
database only. However, if the security level byte is 1, 'slocate'
omits entries from its output if the invoking user is unable to access
them. The second byte of the database is zero. The second byte is
immediately followed by the first database entry. The first entry in
the database is not preceded by any differential count or dummy entry.
Instead the differential count for the first item is assumed to be zero.

Starting with the second entry (if any) in the database, data is
interpreted as for the GNU LOCATE02 format.

File: find.info, Node: Old Database Format, Prev: slocate Database Format, Up: Database Formats

4.2.4 Old Database Format
-------------------------

The old database format is used by Unix 'locate' and 'find' programs and
earlier releases of the GNU ones. 'updatedb' produces this format if
given the '--old-format' option.

'updatedb' runs programs called 'bigram' and 'code' to produce
old-format databases. The old format differs from the new one in the
following ways. Instead of each entry starting with an
offset-differential count byte and ending with a null, byte values from
0 through 28 indicate offset-differential counts from -14 through 14.
The byte value indicating that a long offset-differential count follows
is 0x1e (30), not 0x80. The long counts are stored in host byte order,
which is not necessarily network byte order, and host integer word size,
which is usually 4 bytes. They also represent a count 14 less than
their value. The database lines have no termination byte; the start of
the next line is indicated by its first byte having a value <= 30.

In addition, instead of starting with a dummy entry, the old database
format starts with a 256 byte table containing the 128 most common
bigrams in the file list. A bigram is a pair of adjacent bytes. Bytes
in the database that have the high bit set are indexes (with the high
bit cleared) into the bigram table. The bigram and offset-differential
count coding makes these databases 20-25% smaller than the new format,
but makes them not 8-bit clean. Any byte in a file name that is in the
ranges used for the special codes is replaced in the database by a
question mark, which not coincidentally is the shell wildcard to match a
single character.

The old format therefore cannot faithfully store entries with
non-ASCII characters. It therefore should not be used in
internationalised environments. That is, most installations should not
use it.

Because the long counts are stored by the 'code' program as
native-order machine words, the database format is not easily used in
environments which differ in terms of byte order. If locate databases
are to be shared between machines, the LOCATE02 database format should
be used. This has other benefits as discussed above. However, the
length of the filename currently being processed can normally be used to
place reasonable limits on the long counts and so this information is
used by locate to help it guess the byte ordering of the old format
database. Unless it finds evidence to the contrary, 'locate' will
assume that the byte order of the database is the same as the native
byte order of the machine running 'locate'. The output of 'locate
--statistics' also includes information about the byte order of
old-format databases.

The output of 'locate --statistics' will give an incorrect count of
the number of file names containing newlines or high-bit characters for
old-format databases.

Old versions of GNU 'locate' fail to correctly handle very long file
names, possibly leading to security problems relating to a heap buffer
overrun. *Note Security Considerations for locate::, for a detailed
explanation.

File: find.info, Node: Newline Handling, Prev: Database Formats, Up: Databases

4.3 Newline Handling
====================

Within the database, file names are terminated with a null character.
This is the case for both the old and the new format.

When the new database format is being used, the compression technique
used to generate the database though relies on the ability to sort the
list of files before they are presented to 'frcode'.

If the system's sort command allows its input list of files to be
separated with null characters via the '-z' option, this option is used
and therefore 'updatedb' and 'locate' will both correctly handle file
names containing newlines. If the 'sort' command lacks support for
this, the list of files is delimited with the newline character, meaning
that parts of file names containing newlines will be incorrectly sorted.
This can result in both incorrect matches and incorrect failures to
match.

On the other hand, if you are using the old database format, file
names with embedded newlines are not correctly handled. There is no
technical limitation which enforces this, it's just that the 'bigram'
program has not been updated to support lists of file names separated by
nulls.

So, if you are using the new database format (this is the default)
and your system uses GNU 'sort', newlines will be correctly handled at
all times. Otherwise, newlines may not be correctly handled.

File: find.info, Node: File Permissions, Next: Date input formats, Prev: Databases, Up: Top

5 File Permissions
******************

Each file has a set of "permissions" that control the kinds of access
that users have to that file. The permissions for a file are also
called its "access mode". They can be represented either in symbolic
form or as an octal number.

* Menu:

* Mode Structure:: Structure of file permissions.
* Symbolic Modes:: Mnemonic permissions representation.
* Numeric Modes:: Permissions as octal numbers.

File: find.info, Node: Mode Structure, Next: Symbolic Modes, Up: File Permissions

5.1 Structure of File Permissions
=================================

There are three kinds of permissions that a user can have for a file:

1. permission to read the file. For directories, this means
permission to list the contents of the directory.
2. permission to write to (change) the file. For directories, this
means permission to create and remove files in the directory.
3. permission to execute the file (run it as a program). For
directories, this means permission to access files in the
directory.

There are three categories of users who may have different
permissions to perform any of the above operations on a file:

1. the file's owner;
2. other users who are in the file's group;
3. everyone else.

Files are given an owner and group when they are created. Usually
the owner is the current user and the group is the group of the
directory the file is in, but this varies with the operating system, the
file system the file is created on, and the way the file is created.
You can change the owner and group of a file by using the 'chown' and
'chgrp' commands.

In addition to the three sets of three permissions listed above, a
file's permissions have three special components, which affect only
executable files (programs) and, on some systems, directories:

1. Set the process's effective user ID to that of the file upon
execution (called the "setuid bit"). No effect on directories.
2. Set the process's effective group ID to that of the file upon
execution (called the "setgid bit"). For directories on some
systems, put files created in the directory into the same group as
the directory, no matter what group the user who creates them is
in.
3. prevent users from removing or renaming a file in a directory
unless they own the file or the directory; this is called the
"restricted deletion flag" for the directory. For regular files on
some systems, save the program's text image on the swap device so
it will load more quickly when run; this is called the "sticky
bit".

In addition to the permissions listed above, there may be file
attributes specific to the file system, e.g: access control lists
(ACLs), whether a file is compressed, whether a file can be modified
(immutability), whether a file can be dumped. These are usually set
using programs specific to the file system. For example:

ext2
On GNU and GNU/Linux the file permissions ("attributes") specific
to the ext2 file system are set using 'chattr'.

FFS
On FreeBSD the file permissions ("flags") specific to the FFS file
system are set using 'chrflags'.

Although a file's permission "bits" allow an operation on that file,
that operation may still fail, because:

* the file-system-specific permissions do not permit it;

* the file system is mounted as read-only.

For example, if the immutable attribute is set on a file, it cannot
be modified, regardless of the fact that you may have just run 'chmod
a+w FILE'.

File: find.info, Node: Symbolic Modes, Next: Numeric Modes, Prev: Mode Structure, Up: File Permissions

5.2 Symbolic Modes
==================

"Symbolic modes" represent changes to files' permissions as operations
on single-character symbols. They allow you to modify either all or
selected parts of files' permissions, optionally based on their previous
values, and perhaps on the current 'umask' as well (*note Umask and
Protection::).

The format of symbolic modes is:

[ugoa...][+-=]PERMS...[,...]

where PERMS is either zero or more letters from the set 'rwxXst', or a
single letter from the set 'ugo'.

The following sections describe the operators and other details of
symbolic modes.

* Menu:

* Setting Permissions:: Basic operations on permissions.
* Copying Permissions:: Copying existing permissions.
* Changing Special Permissions:: Special permissions.
* Conditional Executability:: Conditionally affecting executability.
* Multiple Changes:: Making multiple changes.
* Umask and Protection:: The effect of the umask.

File: find.info, Node: Setting Permissions, Next: Copying Permissions, Up: Symbolic Modes

5.2.1 Setting Permissions
-------------------------

The basic symbolic operations on a file's permissions are adding,
removing, and setting the permission that certain users have to read,
write, and execute the file. These operations have the following
format:

USERS OPERATION PERMISSIONS

The spaces between the three parts above are shown for readability only;
symbolic modes cannot contain spaces.

The USERS part tells which users' access to the file is changed. It
consists of one or more of the following letters (or it can be empty;
*note Umask and Protection::, for a description of what happens then).
When more than one of these letters is given, the order that they are in
does not matter.

'u'
the user who owns the file;
'g'
other users who are in the file's group;
'o'
all other users;
'a'
all users; the same as 'ugo'.

The OPERATION part tells how to change the affected users' access to
the file, and is one of the following symbols:

'+'
to add the PERMISSIONS to whatever permissions the USERS already
have for the file;
'-'
to remove the PERMISSIONS from whatever permissions the USERS
already have for the file;
'='
to make the PERMISSIONS the only permissions that the USERS have
for the file.

The PERMISSIONS part tells what kind of access to the file should be
changed; it is normally zero or more of the following letters. As with
the USERS part, the order does not matter when more than one letter is
given. Omitting the PERMISSIONS part is useful only with the '='
operation, where it gives the specified USERS no access at all to the
file.

'r'
the permission the USERS have to read the file;
'w'
the permission the USERS have to write to the file;
'x'
the permission the USERS have to execute the file.

For example, to give everyone permission to read and write a file,
but not to execute it, use:

a=rw

To remove write permission for all users other than the file's owner,
use:

go-w

The above command does not affect the access that the owner of the file
has to it, nor does it affect whether other users can read or execute
the file.

To give everyone except a file's owner no permission to do anything
with that file, use the mode below. Other users could still remove the
file, if they have write permission on the directory it is in.

go=

Another way to specify the same thing is:

og-rwx

File: find.info, Node: Copying Permissions, Next: Changing Special Permissions, Prev: Setting Permissions, Up: Symbolic Modes

5.2.2 Copying Existing Permissions
----------------------------------

You can base a file's permissions on its existing permissions. To do
this, instead of using a series of 'r', 'w', or 'x' letters after the
operator, you use the letter 'u', 'g', or 'o'. For example, the mode

o+g

adds the permissions for users who are in a file's group to the
permissions that other users have for the file. Thus, if the file
started out as mode 664 ('rw-rw-r--'), the above mode would change it to
mode 666 ('rw-rw-rw-'). If the file had started out as mode 741
('rwxr----x'), the above mode would change it to mode 745 ('rwxr--r-x').
The '-' and '=' operations work analogously.

File: find.info, Node: Changing Special Permissions, Next: Conditional Executability, Prev: Copying Permissions, Up: Symbolic Modes

5.2.3 Changing Special Permissions
----------------------------------

In addition to changing a file's read, write, and execute permissions,
you can change its special permissions. *Note Mode Structure::, for a
summary of these permissions.

To change a file's permission to set the user ID on execution, use
'u' in the USERS part of the symbolic mode and 's' in the PERMISSIONS
part.

To change a file's permission to set the group ID on execution, use
'g' in the USERS part of the symbolic mode and 's' in the PERMISSIONS
part.

To change a file's permission to set the restricted deletion flag or
sticky bit, omit the USERS part of the symbolic mode (or use 'a') and
put 't' in the PERMISSIONS part.

For example, to add set-user-ID permission to a program, you can use
the mode:

u+s

To remove both set-user-ID and set-group-ID permission from it, you
can use the mode:

ug-s

To set the restricted deletion flag or sticky bit, you can use the
mode:

The combination 'o+s' has no effect. On GNU systems the combinations
'u+t' and 'g+t' have no effect, and 'o+t' acts like plain '+t'.

The '=' operator is not very useful with special permissions; for
example, the mode:

o=t

does set the restricted deletion flag or sticky bit, but it also removes
all read, write, and execute permissions that users not in the file's
group might have had for it.

File: find.info, Node: Conditional Executability, Next: Multiple Changes, Prev: Changing Special Permissions, Up: Symbolic Modes

5.2.4 Conditional Executability
-------------------------------

There is one more special type of symbolic permission: if you use 'X'
instead of 'x', execute permission is affected only if the file is a
directory or already had execute permission.

For example, this mode:

a+X

gives all users permission to search directories, or to execute files if
anyone could execute them before.

File: find.info, Node: Multiple Changes, Next: Umask and Protection, Prev: Conditional Executability, Up: Symbolic Modes

5.2.5 Making Multiple Changes
-----------------------------

The format of symbolic modes is actually more complex than described
above (*note Setting Permissions::). It provides two ways to make
multiple changes to files' permissions.

The first way is to specify multiple OPERATION and PERMISSIONS parts
after a USERS part in the symbolic mode.

For example, the mode:

og+rX-w

gives users other than the owner of the file read permission and, if it
is a directory or if someone already had execute permission to it, gives
them execute permission; and it also denies them write permission to the
file. It does not affect the permission that the owner of the file has
for it. The above mode is equivalent to the two modes:

og+rX
og-w

The second way to make multiple changes is to specify more than one
simple symbolic mode, separated by commas. For example, the mode:

a+r,go-w

gives everyone permission to read the file and removes write permission
on it for all users except its owner. Another example:

u=rwx,g=rx,o=

sets all of the non-special permissions for the file explicitly. (It
gives users who are not in the file's group no permission at all for
it.)

The two methods can be combined. The mode:

a+r,g+x-w

gives all users permission to read the file, and gives users who are in
the file's group permission to execute it, as well, but not permission
to write to it. The above mode could be written in several different
ways; another is:

u+r,g+rx,o+r,g-w

File: find.info, Node: Umask and Protection, Prev: Multiple Changes, Up: Symbolic Modes

5.2.6 The Umask and Protection
------------------------------

If the USERS part of a symbolic mode is omitted, it defaults to 'a'
(affect all users), except that any permissions that are _set_ in the
system variable 'umask' are _not affected_. The value of 'umask' can be
set using the 'umask' command. Its default value varies from system to
system.

Omitting the USERS part of a symbolic mode is generally not useful
with operations other than '+'. It is useful with '+' because it allows
you to use 'umask' as an easily customizable protection against giving
away more permission to files than you intended to.

As an example, if 'umask' has the value 2, which removes write
permission for users who are not in the file's group, then the mode:

adds permission to write to the file to its owner and to other users who
are in the file's group, but _not_ to other users. In contrast, the
mode:

a+w

ignores 'umask', and _does_ give write permission for the file to all
users.

File: find.info, Node: Numeric Modes, Prev: Symbolic Modes, Up: File Permissions

5.3 Numeric Modes
=================

As an alternative to giving a symbolic mode, you can give an octal (base
8) number that represents the new mode. This number is always
interpreted in octal; you do not have to add a leading 0, as you do in
C. Mode 0055 is the same as mode 55.

A numeric mode is usually shorter than the corresponding symbolic
mode, but it is limited in that it cannot take into account a file's
previous permissions; it can only set them absolutely.

The permissions granted to the user, to other users in the file's
group, and to other users not in the file's group each require three
bits, which are represented as one octal digit. The three special
permissions also require one bit each, and they are as a group
represented as another octal digit. Here is how the bits are arranged,
starting with the lowest valued bit:

Value in Corresponding
Mode Permission

Other users not in the file's group:
1 Execute
2 Write
4 Read

Other users in the file's group:
10 Execute
20 Write
40 Read

The file's owner:
100 Execute
200 Write
400 Read

Special permissions:
1000 Restricted deletion flag or sticky bit
2000 Set group ID on execution
4000 Set user ID on execution

For example, numeric mode 4755 corresponds to symbolic mode
'u=rwxs,go=rx', and numeric mode 664 corresponds to symbolic mode
'ug=rw,o=r'. Numeric mode 0 corresponds to symbolic mode 'a='.

File: find.info, Node: Date input formats, Next: Configuration, Prev: File Permissions, Up: Top

6 Date input formats
********************

First, a quote:

Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had
some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make
it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden
routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better
than handing down our present system. It is like a set of
trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal
surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands
ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy
circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language
and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least
level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and
persistently encourages our terror of time.

... It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width
in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals
demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder
then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last
Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.
...

--Robert Grudin, 'Time and the Art of Living'.

This section describes the textual date representations that GNU
programs accept. These are the strings you, as a user, can supply as
arguments to the various programs. The C interface (via the
'parse_datetime' function) is not described here.

* Menu:

* General date syntax:: Common rules.
* Calendar date items:: 19 Dec 1994.
* Time of day items:: 9:20pm.
* Time zone items:: EST, PDT, UTC, ...
* Combined date and time of day items:: 1972-09-24T20:02:00,000000-0500.
* Day of week items:: Monday and others.
* Relative items in date strings:: next tuesday, 2 years ago.
* Pure numbers in date strings:: 19931219, 1440.
* Seconds since the Epoch:: @1078100502.
* Specifying time zone rules:: TZ="America/New_York", TZ="UTC0".
* Authors of parse_datetime:: Bellovin, Eggert, Salz, Berets, et al.

File: find.info, Node: General date syntax, Next: Calendar date items, Up: Date input formats

6.1 General date syntax
=======================

A "date" is a string, possibly empty, containing many items separated by
whitespace. The whitespace may be omitted when no ambiguity arises.
The empty string means the beginning of today (i.e., midnight). Order
of the items is immaterial. A date string may contain many flavors of
items:

* calendar date items
* time of day items
* time zone items
* combined date and time of day items
* day of the week items
* relative items
* pure numbers.

We describe each of these item types in turn, below.

A few ordinal numbers may be written out in words in some contexts.
This is most useful for specifying day of the week items or relative
items (see below). Among the most commonly used ordinal numbers, the
word 'last' stands for -1, 'this' stands for 0, and 'first' and 'next'
both stand for 1. Because the word 'second' stands for the unit of time
there is no way to write the ordinal number 2, but for convenience
'third' stands for 3, 'fourth' for 4, 'fifth' for 5, 'sixth' for 6,
'seventh' for 7, 'eighth' for 8, 'ninth' for 9, 'tenth' for 10,
'eleventh' for 11 and 'twelfth' for 12.

When a month is written this way, it is still considered to be
written numerically, instead of being "spelled in full"; this changes
the allowed strings.

In the current implementation, only English is supported for words
and abbreviations like 'AM', 'DST', 'EST', 'first', 'January', 'Sunday',
'tomorrow', and 'year'.

The output of the 'date' command is not always acceptable as a date
string, not only because of the language problem, but also because there
is no standard meaning for time zone items like 'IST'. When using
'date' to generate a date string intended to be parsed later, specify a
date format that is independent of language and that does not use time
zone items other than 'UTC' and 'Z'. Here are some ways to do this:

$ LC_ALL=C TZ=UTC0 date
Mon Mar 1 00:21:42 UTC 2004
$ TZ=UTC0 date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%SZ'
2004-03-01 00:21:42Z
$ date --rfc-3339=ns # --rfc-3339 is a GNU extension.
2004-02-29 16:21:42.692722128-08:00
$ date --rfc-2822 # a GNU extension
Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:21:42 -0800
$ date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z' # %z is a GNU extension.
2004-02-29 16:21:42 -0800
$ date +'@%s.%N' # %s and %N are GNU extensions.
@1078100502.692722128

Alphabetic case is completely ignored in dates. Comments may be
introduced between round parentheses, as long as included parentheses
are properly nested. Hyphens not followed by a digit are currently
ignored. Leading zeros on numbers are ignored.

Invalid dates like '2005-02-29' or times like '24:00' are rejected.
In the typical case of a host that does not support leap seconds, a time
like '23:59:60' is rejected even if it corresponds to a valid leap
second.

File: find.info, Node: Calendar date items, Next: Time of day items, Prev: General date syntax, Up: Date input formats

6.2 Calendar date items
=======================

A "calendar date item" specifies a day of the year. It is specified
differently, depending on whether the month is specified numerically or
literally. All these strings specify the same calendar date:

1972-09-24 # ISO 8601.
72-9-24 # Assume 19xx for 69 through 99,
# 20xx for 00 through 68.
72-09-24 # Leading zeros are ignored.
9/24/72 # Common U.S. writing.
24 September 1972
24 Sept 72 # September has a special abbreviation.
24 Sep 72 # Three-letter abbreviations always allowed.
Sep 24, 1972
24-sep-72
24sep72

The year can also be omitted. In this case, the last specified year
is used, or the current year if none. For example:

9/24
sep 24

Here are the rules.

For numeric months, the ISO 8601 format 'YEAR-MONTH-DAY' is allowed,
where YEAR is any positive number, MONTH is a number between 01 and 12,
and DAY is a number between 01 and 31. A leading zero must be present
if a number is less than ten. If YEAR is 68 or smaller, then 2000 is
added to it; otherwise, if YEAR is less than 100, then 1900 is added to
it. The construct 'MONTH/DAY/YEAR', popular in the United States, is
accepted. Also 'MONTH/DAY', omitting the year.

Literal months may be spelled out in full: 'January', 'February',
'March', 'April', 'May', 'June', 'July', 'August', 'September',
'October', 'November' or 'December'. Literal months may be abbreviated
to their first three letters, possibly followed by an abbreviating dot.
It is also permitted to write 'Sept' instead of 'September'.

When months are written literally, the calendar date may be given as
any of the following:

DAY MONTH YEAR
DAY MONTH
MONTH DAY YEAR
DAY-MONTH-YEAR

Or, omitting the year:

MONTH DAY

File: find.info, Node: Time of day items, Next: Time zone items, Prev: Calendar date items, Up: Date input formats

6.3 Time of day items
=====================

A "time of day item" in date strings specifies the time on a given day.
Here are some examples, all of which represent the same time:

20:02:00.000000
20:02
8:02pm
20:02-0500 # In EST (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).

More generally, the time of day may be given as 'HOUR:MINUTE:SECOND',
where HOUR is a number between 0 and 23, MINUTE is a number between 0
and 59, and SECOND is a number between 0 and 59 possibly followed by '.'
or ',' and a fraction containing one or more digits. Alternatively,
':SECOND' can be omitted, in which case it is taken to be zero. On the
rare hosts that support leap seconds, SECOND may be 60.

If the time is followed by 'am' or 'pm' (or 'a.m.' or 'p.m.'), HOUR
is restricted to run from 1 to 12, and ':MINUTE' may be omitted (taken
to be zero). 'am' indicates the first half of the day, 'pm' indicates
the second half of the day. In this notation, 12 is the predecessor of
1: midnight is '12am' while noon is '12pm'. (This is the zero-oriented
interpretation of '12am' and '12pm', as opposed to the old tradition
derived from Latin which uses '12m' for noon and '12pm' for midnight.)

The time may alternatively be followed by a time zone correction,
expressed as 'SHHMM', where S is '+' or '-', HH is a number of zone
hours and MM is a number of zone minutes. The zone minutes term, MM,
may be omitted, in which case the one- or two-digit correction is
interpreted as a number of hours. You can also separate HH from MM with
a colon. When a time zone correction is given this way, it forces
interpretation of the time relative to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC),
overriding any previous specification for the time zone or the local
time zone. For example, '+0530' and '+05:30' both stand for the time
zone 5.5 hours ahead of UTC (e.g., India). This is the best way to
specify a time zone correction by fractional parts of an hour. The
maximum zone correction is 24 hours.

Either 'am'/'pm' or a time zone correction may be specified, but not
both.

File: find.info, Node: Time zone items, Next: Combined date and time of day items, Prev: Time of day items, Up: Date input formats

6.4 Time zone items
===================

A "time zone item" specifies an international time zone, indicated by a
small set of letters, e.g., 'UTC' or 'Z' for Coordinated Universal Time.
Any included periods are ignored. By following a non-daylight-saving
time zone by the string 'DST' in a separate word (that is, separated by
some white space), the corresponding daylight saving time zone may be
specified. Alternatively, a non-daylight-saving time zone can be
followed by a time zone correction, to add the two values. This is
normally done only for 'UTC'; for example, 'UTC+05:30' is equivalent to
'+05:30'.

Time zone items other than 'UTC' and 'Z' are obsolescent and are not
recommended, because they are ambiguous; for example, 'EST' has a
different meaning in Australia than in the United States. Instead, it's
better to use unambiguous numeric time zone corrections like '-0500', as
described in the previous section.

If neither a time zone item nor a time zone correction is supplied,
time stamps are interpreted using the rules of the default time zone
(*note Specifying time zone rules::).

File: find.info, Node: Combined date and time of day items, Next: Day of week items, Prev: Time zone items, Up: Date input formats

6.5 Combined date and time of day items
=======================================

The ISO 8601 date and time of day extended format consists of an ISO
8601 date, a 'T' character separator, and an ISO 8601 time of day. This
format is also recognized if the 'T' is replaced by a space.

In this format, the time of day should use 24-hour notation.
Fractional seconds are allowed, with either comma or period preceding
the fraction. ISO 8601 fractional minutes and hours are not supported.
Typically, hosts support nanosecond timestamp resolution; excess
precision is silently discarded.

Here are some examples:

2012-09-24T20:02:00.052-05:00
2012-12-31T23:59:59,999999999+11:00
1970-01-01 00:00Z

File: find.info, Node: Day of week items, Next: Relative items in date strings, Prev: Combined date and time of day items, Up: Date input formats

6.6 Day of week items
=====================

The explicit mention of a day of the week will forward the date (only if
necessary) to reach that day of the week in the future.

Days of the week may be spelled out in full: 'Sunday', 'Monday',
'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday' or 'Saturday'. Days may be
abbreviated to their first three letters, optionally followed by a
period. The special abbreviations 'Tues' for 'Tuesday', 'Wednes' for
'Wednesday' and 'Thur' or 'Thurs' for 'Thursday' are also allowed.

A number may precede a day of the week item to move forward
supplementary weeks. It is best used in expression like 'third monday'.
In this context, 'last DAY' or 'next DAY' is also acceptable; they move
one week before or after the day that DAY by itself would represent.

A comma following a day of the week item is ignored.

File: find.info, Node: Relative items in date strings, Next: Pure numbers in date strings, Prev: Day of week items, Up: Date input formats

6.7 Relative items in date strings
==================================

"Relative items" adjust a date (or the current date if none) forward or
backward. The effects of relative items accumulate. Here are some
examples:

1 year
1 year ago
3 years
2 days

The unit of time displacement may be selected by the string 'year' or
'month' for moving by whole years or months. These are fuzzy units, as
years and months are not all of equal duration. More precise units are
'fortnight' which is worth 14 days, 'week' worth 7 days, 'day' worth 24
hours, 'hour' worth 60 minutes, 'minute' or 'min' worth 60 seconds, and
'second' or 'sec' worth one second. An 's' suffix on these units is
accepted and ignored.

The unit of time may be preceded by a multiplier, given as an
optionally signed number. Unsigned numbers are taken as positively
signed. No number at all implies 1 for a multiplier. Following a
relative item by the string 'ago' is equivalent to preceding the unit by
a multiplier with value -1.

The string 'tomorrow' is worth one day in the future (equivalent to
'day'), the string 'yesterday' is worth one day in the past (equivalent
to 'day ago').

The strings 'now' or 'today' are relative items corresponding to
zero-valued time displacement, these strings come from the fact a
zero-valued time displacement represents the current time when not
otherwise changed by previous items. They may be used to stress other
items, like in '12:00 today'. The string 'this' also has the meaning of
a zero-valued time displacement, but is preferred in date strings like
'this thursday'.

When a relative item causes the resulting date to cross a boundary
where the clocks were adjusted, typically for daylight saving time, the
resulting date and time are adjusted accordingly.

The fuzz in units can cause problems with relative items. For
example, '2003-07-31 -1 month' might evaluate to 2003-07-01, because
2003-06-31 is an invalid date. To determine the previous month more
reliably, you can ask for the month before the 15th of the current
month. For example:

$ date -R
Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:02:39 -0700
$ date --date='-1 month' +'Last month was %B?'
Last month was July?
$ date --date="$(date +%Y-%m-15) -1 month" +'Last month was %B!'
Last month was June!

Also, take care when manipulating dates around clock changes such as
daylight saving leaps. In a few cases these have added or subtracted as
much as 24 hours from the clock, so it is often wise to adopt universal
time by setting the 'TZ' environment variable to 'UTC0' before embarking
on calendrical calculations.

File: find.info, Node: Pure numbers in date strings, Next: Seconds since the Epoch, Prev: Relative items in date strings, Up: Date input formats

6.8 Pure numbers in date strings
================================

The precise interpretation of a pure decimal number depends on the
context in the date string.

If the decimal number is of the form YYYYMMDD and no other calendar
date item (*note Calendar date items::) appears before it in the date
string, then YYYY is read as the year, MM as the month number and DD as
the day of the month, for the specified calendar date.

If the decimal number is of the form HHMM and no other time of day
item appears before it in the date string, then HH is read as the hour
of the day and MM as the minute of the hour, for the specified time of
day. MM can also be omitted.

If both a calendar date and a time of day appear to the left of a
number in the date string, but no relative item, then the number
overrides the year.

File: find.info, Node: Seconds since the Epoch, Next: Specifying time zone rules, Prev: Pure numbers in date strings, Up: Date input formats

6.9 Seconds since the Epoch
===========================

If you precede a number with '@', it represents an internal time stamp
as a count of seconds. The number can contain an internal decimal point
(either '.' or ','); any excess precision not supported by the internal
representation is truncated toward minus infinity. Such a number cannot
be combined with any other date item, as it specifies a complete time
stamp.

Internally, computer times are represented as a count of seconds
since an epoch--a well-defined point of time. On GNU and POSIX systems,
the epoch is 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, so '@0' represents this time, '@1'
represents 1970-01-01 00:00:01 UTC, and so forth. GNU and most other
POSIX-compliant systems support such times as an extension to POSIX,
using negative counts, so that '@-1' represents 1969-12-31 23:59:59 UTC.

Traditional Unix systems count seconds with 32-bit two's-complement
integers and can represent times from 1901-12-13 20:45:52 through
2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC. More modern systems use 64-bit counts of
seconds with nanosecond subcounts, and can represent all the times in
the known lifetime of the universe to a resolution of 1 nanosecond.

On most hosts, these counts ignore the presence of leap seconds. For
example, on most hosts '@915148799' represents 1998-12-31 23:59:59 UTC,
'@915148800' represents 1999-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, and there is no way to
represent the intervening leap second 1998-12-31 23:59:60 UTC.

File: find.info, Node: Specifying time zone rules, Next: Authors of parse_datetime, Prev: Seconds since the Epoch, Up: Date input formats

6.10 Specifying time zone rules
===============================

Normally, dates are interpreted using the rules of the current time
zone, which in turn are specified by the 'TZ' environment variable, or
by a system default if 'TZ' is not set. To specify a different set of
default time zone rules that apply just to one date, start the date with
a string of the form 'TZ="RULE"'. The two quote characters ('"') must
be present in the date, and any quotes or backslashes within RULE must
be escaped by a backslash.

For example, with the GNU 'date' command you can answer the question
"What time is it in New York when a Paris clock shows 6:30am on October
31, 2004?" by using a date beginning with 'TZ="Europe/Paris"' as shown
in the following shell transcript:

$ export TZ="America/New_York"
$ date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
Sun Oct 31 01:30:00 EDT 2004

In this example, the '--date' operand begins with its own 'TZ'
setting, so the rest of that operand is processed according to
'Europe/Paris' rules, treating the string '2004-10-31 06:30' as if it
were in Paris. However, since the output of the 'date' command is
processed according to the overall time zone rules, it uses New York
time. (Paris was normally six hours ahead of New York in 2004, but this
example refers to a brief Halloween period when the gap was five hours.)

A 'TZ' value is a rule that typically names a location in the 'tz'
database (http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm). A recent catalog of
location names appears in the TWiki Date and Time Gateway
(http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/xtra/tzdate). A few non-GNU hosts require a
colon before a location name in a 'TZ' setting, e.g.,
'TZ=":America/New_York"'.

The 'tz' database includes a wide variety of locations ranging from
'Arctic/Longyearbyen' to 'Antarctica/South_Pole', but if you are at sea
and have your own private time zone, or if you are using a non-GNU host
that does not support the 'tz' database, you may need to use a POSIX
rule instead. Simple POSIX rules like 'UTC0' specify a time zone
without daylight saving time; other rules can specify simple daylight
saving regimes. *Note Specifying the Time Zone with 'TZ': (libc)TZ
Variable.

File: find.info, Node: Authors of parse_datetime, Prev: Specifying time zone rules, Up: Date input formats

6.11 Authors of 'parse_datetime'
================================

'parse_datetime' started life as 'getdate', as originally implemented by
Steven M. Bellovin (<smb@research.att.com>) while at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The code was later tweaked by a couple
of people on Usenet, then completely overhauled by Rich $alz
(<rsalz@bbn.com>) and Jim Berets (<jberets@bbn.com>) in August, 1990.
Various revisions for the GNU system were made by David MacKenzie, Jim
Meyering, Paul Eggert and others, including renaming it to 'get_date' to
avoid a conflict with the alternative Posix function 'getdate', and a
later rename to 'parse_datetime'. The Posix function 'getdate' can
parse more locale-specific dates using 'strptime', but relies on an
environment variable and external file, and lacks the thread-safety of
'parse_datetime'.

This chapter was originally produced by Franc,ois Pinard
(<pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>) from the 'parse_datetime.y' source code, and
then edited by K. Berry (<kb@cs.umb.edu>).

File: find.info, Node: Configuration, Next: Reference, Prev: Date input formats, Up: Top

7 Configuration
***************

The findutils source distribution includes a 'configure' script which
examines the system and generates files required to build findutils.
See the files 'README' and 'INSTALL'.

A number of options can be specified on the 'configure' command line,
and many of these are straightforward, adequately documented in the
'--help' output, or not normally useful. Options which are useful or
which are not obvious are explained here.

* Menu:

* Leaf Optimisation:: Take advantage of Unix file system semantics.
* d_type Optimisation:: Take advantage of file type information.
* fts:: A non-recursive file system search.

File: find.info, Node: Leaf Optimisation, Next: d_type Optimisation, Up: Configuration

7.1 Leaf Optimisation
=====================

Files in Unix file systems have a link count which indicates how many
names point to the same inode. Directories in Unix filssytems have a
'..' entry which functions as a hard link to the parent directory and a
'.' entry which functions as a link to the directory itself. The '..'
entry of the root directory also points to the root. This means that
'find' can deduce the number of subdirectories a directory has, simply
by subtracting 2 from the directory's link count. This allows 'find'
the calls to 'stat' which would otherwise be needed to discover which
directory entries are subdirectories.

File systems which don't have these semantics should simply return a
value less than 2 in the 'st_nlinks' member of 'struct stat' in response
to a successful call to 'stat'.

If you are building 'find' for a system on which the value of
'st_nlinks' is unreliable, you can specify '--disable-leaf-optimisation'
to 'configure' to prevent this assumption being made.

File: find.info, Node: d_type Optimisation, Next: fts, Prev: Leaf Optimisation, Up: Configuration

7.2 d_type Optimisation
=======================

When this feature is enabled, 'find' takes advantage of the fact that on
some systems 'readdir' will return the type of a file in 'struct
dirent'.

File: find.info, Node: fts, Prev: d_type Optimisation, Up: Configuration

7.3 fts
=======

The findutils source distribution contains two different implementations
of 'find'. The older implementation descends the file system
recursively, while the newer one uses 'fts'. Both are normally
installed.

If the option '--without-fts' was passed to 'configure', the
recursive implementation is installed as 'find' and the fts-based
implementation is installed as 'ftsfind'. Otherwise, the fts-based
implementation is installed as 'find' and the recursive implementation
is installed as 'oldfind'.

File: find.info, Node: Reference, Next: Common Tasks, Prev: Configuration, Up: Top

8 Reference
***********

Below are summaries of the command line syntax for the programs
discussed in this manual.

* Menu:

* Invoking find::
* Invoking locate::
* Invoking updatedb::
* Invoking xargs::
* Regular Expressions::
* Environment Variables::

File: find.info, Node: Invoking find, Next: Invoking locate, Up: Reference

8.1 Invoking 'find'
===================

find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D DEBUGOPTIONS] [-OLEVEL] [FILE...] [EXPRESSION]

'find' searches the directory tree rooted at each file name FILE by
evaluating the EXPRESSION on each file it finds in the tree.

The command line may begin with the '-H', '-L', '-P', '-D' and '-O'
options. These are followed by a list of files or directories that
should be searched. If no files to search are specified, the current
directory ('.') is used.

This list of files to search is followed by a list of expressions
describing the files we wish to search for. The first part of the
expression is recognised by the fact that it begins with '-' followed by
some other letters (for example '-print'), or is either '(' or '!'. Any
arguments after it are the rest of the expression.

If no expression is given, the expression '-print' is used.

The 'find' command exits with status zero if all files matched are
processed successfully, greater than zero if errors occur.

The 'find' program also recognises two options for administrative
use:

'--help'
Print a summary of the command line usage and exit.
'--version'
Print the version number of 'find' and exit.

The '-version' option is a synonym for '--version'

* Menu:

* Filesystem Traversal Options::
* Warning Messages::
* Optimisation Options::
* Debug Options::
* Find Expressions::

File: find.info, Node: Filesystem Traversal Options, Next: Warning Messages, Up: Invoking find

8.1.1 Filesystem Traversal Options
----------------------------------

The options '-H', '-L' or '-P' may be specified at the start of the
command line (if none of these is specified, '-P' is assumed). If you
specify more than one of these options, the last one specified takes
effect (but note that the '-follow' option is equivalent to '-L').

'-P'
Never follow symbolic links (this is the default), except in the
case of the '-xtype' predicate.
'-L'
Always follow symbolic links, except in the case of the '-xtype'
predicate.
'-H'
Follow symbolic links specified in the list of files to search, or
which are otherwise specified on the command line.

If 'find' would follow a symbolic link, but cannot for any reason
(for example, because it has insufficient permissions or the link is
broken), it falls back on using the properties of the symbolic link
itself. *note Symbolic Links:: for a more complete description of how
symbolic links are handled.

File: find.info, Node: Warning Messages, Next: Optimisation Options, Prev: Filesystem Traversal Options, Up: Invoking find

8.1.2 Warning Messages
----------------------

If there is an error on the 'find' command line, an error message is
normally issued. However, there are some usages that are inadvisable
but which 'find' should still accept. Under these circumstances, 'find'
may issue a warning message.

By default, warnings are enabled only if 'find' is being run
interactively (specifically, if the standard input is a terminal) and
the 'POSIXLY_CORRECT' environment variable is not set. Warning messages
can be controlled explicitly by the use of options on the command line:

'-warn'
Issue warning messages where appropriate.
'-nowarn'
Do not issue warning messages.

These options take effect at the point on the command line where they
are specified. Therefore it's not useful to specify '-nowarn' at the
end of the command line. The warning messages affected by the above
options are triggered by:

- Use of the '-d' option which is deprecated; please use '-depth'
instead, since the latter is POSIX-compliant.
- Use of the '-ipath' option which is deprecated; please use
'-iwholename' instead.
- Specifying an option (for example '-mindepth') after a non-option
(for example '-type' or '-print') on the command line.
- Use of the '-name' or '-iname' option with a slash character in the
pattern. Since the name predicates only compare against the
basename of the visited files, the only file that can match a slash
is the root directory itself.

The default behaviour above is designed to work in that way so that
existing shell scripts don't generate spurious errors, but people will
be made aware of the problem.

Some warning messages are issued for less common or more serious
problems, and consequently cannot be turned off:

- Use of an unrecognised backslash escape sequence with '-fprintf'
- Use of an unrecognised formatting directive with '-fprintf'

File: find.info, Node: Optimisation Options, Next: Debug Options, Prev: Warning Messages, Up: Invoking find

8.1.3 Optimisation Options
--------------------------

The '-OLEVEL' option sets 'find''s optimisation level to LEVEL. The
default optimisation level is 1.

At certain optimisation levels, 'find' reorders tests to speed up
execution while preserving the overall effect; that is, predicates with
side effects are not reordered relative to each other. The
optimisations performed at each optimisation level are as follows.

'0'
Currently equivalent to optimisation level 1.

'1'
This is the default optimisation level and corresponds to the
traditional behaviour. Expressions are reordered so that tests
based only on the names of files (for example' -name' and '-regex')
are performed first.

'2'
Any '-type' or '-xtype' tests are performed after any tests based
only on the names of files, but before any tests that require
information from the inode. On many modern versions of Unix, file
types are returned by 'readdir()' and so these predicates are
faster to evaluate than predicates which need to stat the file
first.

If you use the '-fstype FOO' predicate and specify a filsystem type
'FOO' which is not known (that is, present in '/etc/mtab') at the
time 'find' starts, that predicate is equivalent to '-false'.

'3'
At this optimisation level, the full cost-based query optimiser is
enabled. The order of tests is modified so that cheap (i.e., fast)
tests are performed first and more expensive ones are performed
later, if necessary. Within each cost band, predicates are
evaluated earlier or later according to whether they are likely to
succeed or not. For '-o', predicates which are likely to succeed
are evaluated earlier, and for '-a', predicates which are likely to
fail are evaluated earlier.

File: find.info, Node: Debug Options, Next: Find Expressions, Prev: Optimisation Options, Up: Invoking find

8.1.4 Debug Options
-------------------

The '-D' option makes 'find' produce diagnostic output. Much of the
information is useful only for diagnosing problems, and so most people
will not find this option helpful.

The list of debug options should be comma separated. Compatibility
of the debug options is not guaranteed between releases of findutils.
For a complete list of valid debug options, see the output of 'find -D
help'. Valid debug options include:
'help'
Explain the debugging options.
'tree'
Show the expression tree in its original and optimised form.
'stat'
Print messages as files are examined with the stat and lstat system
calls. The find program tries to minimise such calls.
'opt'
Prints diagnostic information relating to the optimisation of the
expression tree; see the '-O' option.
'rates'
Prints a summary indicating how often each predicate succeeded or
failed.

File: find.info, Node: Find Expressions, Prev: Debug Options, Up: Invoking find

8.1.5 Find Expressions
----------------------

The final part of the 'find' command line is a list of expressions.
*Note Primary Index::, for a summary of all of the tests, actions, and
options that the expression can contain. If the expression is missing,
'-print' is assumed.

File: find.info, Node: Invoking locate, Next: Invoking updatedb, Prev: Invoking find, Up: Reference

8.2 Invoking 'locate'
=====================

locate [OPTION...] PATTERN...

For each PATTERN given 'locate' searches one or more file name
databases returning each match of PATTERN.

'--all'
'-A'
Print only names which match all non-option arguments, not those
matching one or more non-option arguments.

'--basename'
'-b'
The specified pattern is matched against just the last component of
the name of a file in the 'locate' database. This last component
is also called the "base name". For example, the base name of
'/tmp/mystuff/foo.old.c' is 'foo.old.c'. If the pattern contains
metacharacters, it must match the base name exactly. If not, it
must match part of the base name.

'--count'
'-c'
Instead of printing the matched file names, just print the total
number of matches found, unless '--print' ('-p') is also present.

'--database=PATH'
'-d PATH'
Instead of searching the default 'locate' database
'/usr/local/var/locatedb', 'locate' searches the file name
databases in PATH, which is a colon-separated list of database file
names. You can also use the environment variable 'LOCATE_PATH' to
set the list of database files to search. The option overrides the
environment variable if both are used. Empty elements in PATH
(that is, a leading or trailing colon, or two colons in a row) are
taken to stand for the default database. A database can be
supplied on stdin, using '-' as an element of 'path'. If more than
one element of 'path' is '-', later instances are ignored (but a
warning message is printed).

'--existing'
'-e'
Only print out such names which currently exist (instead of such
names which existed when the database was created). Note that this
may slow down the program a lot, if there are many matches in the
database. The way in which broken symbolic links are treated is
affected by the '-L', '-P' and '-H' options. Please note that it
is possible for the file to be deleted after 'locate' has checked
that it exists, but before you use it. This option is
automatically turned on when reading an 'slocate' database in
secure mode (*note slocate Database Format::).

'--non-existing'
'-E'
Only print out such names which currently do not exist (instead of
such names which existed when the database was created). Note that
this may slow down the program a lot, if there are many matches in
the database. The way in which broken symbolic links are treated
is affected by the '-L', '-P' and '-H' options. Please note that
'locate' checks that the file does not exist, but a file of the
same name might be created after 'locate''s check but before you
read 'locate''s output.

'--follow'
'-L'
If testing for the existence of files (with the '-e' or '-E'
options), consider broken symbolic links to be non-existing. This
is the default behaviour.

'--nofollow'
'-P'
'-H'
If testing for the existence of files (with the '-e' or '-E'
options), treat broken symbolic links as if they were existing
files. The '-H' form of this option is provided purely for
similarity with 'find'; the use of '-P' is recommended over '-H'.

'--ignore-case'
'-i'
Ignore case distinctions in both the pattern and the file names.

'--limit=N'
'-l N'
Limit the number of results printed to N. When used with the
'--count' option, the value printed will never be larger than this
limit.
'--max-database-age=D'
Normally, 'locate' will issue a warning message when it searches a
database which is more than 8 days old. This option changes that
value to something other than 8. The effect of specifying a
negative value is undefined.
'--mmap'
'-m'
Accepted but does nothing. The option is supported only to provide
compatibility with BSD's 'locate'.

'--null'
'-0'
Results are separated with the ASCII NUL character rather than the
newline character. To get the full benefit of this option, use the
new 'locate' database format (that is the default anyway).

'--print'
'-p'
Print search results when they normally would not be due to use of
'--statistics' ('-S') or '--count' ('-c').

'--wholename'
'-w'
The specified pattern is matched against the whole name of the file
in the 'locate' database. If the pattern contains metacharacters,
it must match exactly. If not, it must match part of the whole
file name. This is the default behaviour.

'--regex'
'-r'
Instead of using substring or shell glob matching, the pattern
specified on the command line is understood to be a regular
expression. GNU Emacs-style regular expressions are assumed unless
the '--regextype' option is also given. File names from the
'locate' database are matched using the specified regular
expression. If the '-i' flag is also given, matching is
case-insensitive. Matches are performed against the whole path
name, and so by default a pathname will be matched if any part of
it matches the specified regular expression. The regular
expression may use '^' or '$' to anchor a match at the beginning or
end of a pathname.

'--regextype'
This option changes the regular expression syntax and behaviour
used by the '--regex' option. *note Regular Expressions:: for more
information on the regular expression dialects understood by GNU
findutils.

'--stdio'
'-s'
Accepted but does nothing. The option is supported only to provide
compatibility with BSD's 'locate'.

'--statistics'
'-S'
Print some summary information for each 'locate' database. No
search is performed unless non-option arguments are given.
Although the BSD version of locate also has this option, the format
of the output is different.

'--help'
Print a summary of the command line usage for 'locate' and exit.

'--version'
Print the version number of 'locate' and exit.

File: find.info, Node: Invoking updatedb, Next: Invoking xargs, Prev: Invoking locate, Up: Reference

8.3 Invoking 'updatedb'
=======================

updatedb [OPTION...]

'updatedb' creates and updates the database of file names used by
'locate'. 'updatedb' generates a list of files similar to the output of
'find' and then uses utilities for optimizing the database for
performance. 'updatedb' is often run periodically as a 'cron' job and
configured with environment variables or command options. Typically,
operating systems have a shell script that "exports" configurations for
variable definitions and uses another shell script that "sources" the
configuration file into the environment and then executes 'updatedb' in
the environment.

'--findoptions='OPTION...''
Global options to pass on to 'find'. The environment variable
'FINDOPTIONS' also sets this value. Default is none.

'--localpaths='PATH...''
Non-network directories to put in the database. Default is '/'.

'--netpaths='PATH...''
Network (NFS, AFS, RFS, etc.) directories to put in the database.
The environment variable 'NETPATHS' also sets this value. Default
is none.

'--prunepaths='PATH...''
Directories to omit from the database, which would otherwise be
included. The environment variable 'PRUNEPATHS' also sets this
value. Default is '/tmp /usr/tmp /var/tmp /afs'. The paths are
used as regular expressions (with 'find ... -regex', so you need to
specify these paths in the same way that 'find' will encounter
them. This means for example that the paths must not include
trailing slashes.

'--prunefs='PATH...''
Filesystems to omit from the database, which would otherwise be
included. Note that files are pruned when a filesystem is reached;
Any filesystem mounted under an undesired filesystem will be
ignored. The environment variable 'PRUNEFS' also sets this value.
Default is 'nfs NFS proc'.

'--output=DBFILE'
The database file to build. The default is system-dependent, but
when this document was formatted it was '/usr/local/var/locatedb'.

'--localuser=USER'
The user to search the non-network directories as, using 'su'.
Default is to search the non-network directories as the current
user. You can also use the environment variable 'LOCALUSER' to set
this user.

'--netuser=USER'
The user to search network directories as, using 'su'. Default
'user' is 'daemon'. You can also use the environment variable
'NETUSER' to set this user.

'--old-format'
Generate a 'locate' database in the old format, for compatibility
with versions of 'locate' other than GNU 'locate'. Using this
option means that 'locate' will not be able to properly handle
non-ASCII characters in file names (that is, file names containing
characters which have the eighth bit set, such as many of the
characters from the ISO-8859-1 character set). *Note Database
Formats::, for a detailed description of the supported database
formats.

'--dbformat=FORMAT'
Generate the locate database in format 'FORMAT'. Supported
database formats include 'LOCATE02' (which is the default), 'old'
and 'slocate'. The 'old' format exists for compatibility with
implementations of 'locate' on other Unix systems. The 'slocate'
format exists for compatibility with 'slocate'. *Note Database
Formats::, for a detailed description of each format.

'--help'
Print a summary of the command line usage and exit.
'--version'
Print the version number of 'updatedb' and exit.

File: find.info, Node: Invoking xargs, Next: Regular Expressions, Prev: Invoking updatedb, Up: Reference

8.4 Invoking 'xargs'
====================

xargs [OPTION...] [COMMAND [INITIAL-ARGUMENTS]]

'xargs' exits with the following status:

0
if it succeeds
123
if any invocation of the command exited with status 1-125
124
if the command exited with status 255
125
if the command is killed by a signal
126
if the command cannot be run
127
if the command is not found
1
if some other error occurred.

Exit codes greater than 128 are used by the shell to indicate that a
program died due to a fatal signal.

* Menu:

* xargs options::
* Invoking the shell from xargs::

File: find.info, Node: xargs options, Next: Invoking the shell from xargs, Up: Invoking xargs

8.4.1 xargs options
-------------------

'--arg-file=INPUTFILE'
'-a INPUTFILE'
Read names from the file INPUTFILE instead of standard input. If
you use this option, the standard input stream remains unchanged
when commands are run. Otherwise, stdin is redirected from
'/dev/null'.

'--null'
'-0'
Input file names are terminated by a null character instead of by
whitespace, and any quotes and backslash characters are not
considered special (every character is taken literally). Disables
the end of file string, which is treated like any other argument.

'--delimiter DELIM'
'-d DELIM'

Input file names are terminated by the specified character DELIM
instead of by whitespace, and any quotes and backslash characters
are not considered special (every character is taken literally).
Disables the logical end of file marker string, which is treated
like any other argument.

The specified delimiter may be a single character, a C-style
character escape such as '\n', or an octal or hexadecimal escape
code. Octal and hexadecimal escape codes are understood as for the
'printf' command. Multibyte characters are not supported.

'-E EOF-STR'
'--eof[=EOF-STR]'
'-e[EOF-STR]'

Set the logical end of file marker string to EOF-STR. If the
logical end of file marker string occurs as a line of input, the
rest of the input is ignored. If EOF-STR is omitted ('-e') or
blank (either '-e' or '-E'), there is no logical end of file marker
string. The '-e' form of this option is deprecated in favour of
the POSIX-compliant '-E' option, which you should use instead. As
of GNU 'xargs' version 4.2.9, the default behaviour of 'xargs' is
not to have a logical end of file marker string. The POSIX
standard (IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition) allows this.

The logical end of file marker string is not treated specially if
the '-d' or the '-0' options are in effect. That is, when either
of these options are in effect, the whole input file will be read
even if '-E' was used.

'--help'
Print a summary of the options to 'xargs' and exit.

'-I REPLACE-STR'
'--replace[=REPLACE-STR]'
'-i[REPLACE-STR]'
Replace occurrences of REPLACE-STR in the initial arguments with
names read from standard input. Also, unquoted blanks do not
terminate arguments; instead, the input is split at newlines only.
If REPLACE-STR is omitted (omitting it is allowed only for '-i'),
it defaults to '{}' (like for 'find -exec'). Implies '-x' and '-l
1'. The '-i' option is deprecated in favour of the '-I' option.

'-L MAX-LINES'
'--max-lines[=MAX-LINES]'
'-l[MAX-LINES]'
Use at most MAX-LINES non-blank input lines per command line. For
'-l', MAX-LINES defaults to 1 if omitted. For '-L', the argument
is mandatory. Trailing blanks cause an input line to be logically
continued on the next input line, for the purpose of counting the
lines. Implies '-x'. The '-l' form of this option is deprecated
in favour of the POSIX-compliant '-L' option.

'--interactive'
'-p'
Prompt the user about whether to run each command line and read a
line from the terminal. Only run the command line if the response
starts with 'y' or 'Y'. Implies '-t'.

'--no-run-if-empty'
'-r'
If the standard input is completely empty, do not run the command.
By default, the command is run once even if there is no input.

'--max-chars=MAX-CHARS'
'-s MAX-CHARS'
Use at most MAX-CHARS characters per command line, including the
command, initial arguments and any terminating nulls at the ends of
the argument strings.

'--show-limits'
Display the limits on the command-line length which are imposed by
the operating system, 'xargs'' choice of buffer size and the '-s'
option. Pipe the input from '/dev/null' (and perhaps specify
'--no-run-if-empty') if you don't want 'xargs' to do anything.

'--verbose'
'-t'
Print the command line on the standard error output before
executing it.

'--version'
Print the version number of 'xargs' and exit.

'--exit'
'-x'
Exit if the size (see the '-s' option) is exceeded.

'--max-procs=MAX-PROCS'
'-P MAX-PROCS'
Run simultaneously up to MAX-PROCS processes at once; the default
is 1. If MAX-PROCS is 0, 'xargs' will run as many processes as
possible simultaneously. *Note Controlling Parallelism::, for
information on dynamically controlling parallelism.

'--process-slot-var=ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE-NAME'
Set the environment variable ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE-NAME to a unique
value in each running child process. Each value is a decimal
integer. Values are reused once child processes exit. This can be
used in a rudimentary load distribution scheme, for example.

File: find.info, Node: Invoking the shell from xargs, Prev: xargs options, Up: Invoking xargs

8.4.2 Invoking the shell from xargs
-----------------------------------

Normally, 'xargs' will exec the command you specified directly, without
invoking a shell. This is normally the behaviour one would want. It's
somewhat more efficient and avoids problems with shell metacharacters,
for example. However, sometimes it is necessary to manipulate the
environment of a command before it is run, in a way that 'xargs' does
not directly support.

Invoking a shell from 'xargs' is a good way of performing such
manipulations. However, some care must be taken to prevent problems,
for example unwanted interpretation of shell metacharacters.

This command moves a set of files into an archive directory:

find /foo -maxdepth 1 -atime +366 -exec mv {} /archive \;

However, this will only move one file at a time. We cannot in this
case use '-exec ... +' because the matched file names are added at the
end of the command line, while the destination directory would need to
be specified last. We also can't use 'xargs' in the obvious way for the
same reason. One way of working around this problem is to make use of
the special properties of GNU 'mv'; it has a '-t' option that allows the
target directory to be specified before the list of files to be moved.
However, while this technique works for GNU 'mv', it doesn't solve the
more general problem.

Here is a more general technique for solving this problem:

find /foo -maxdepth 1 -atime +366 -print0 |
xargs -r0 sh -c 'mv "$@" /archive' move

Here, a shell is being invoked. There are two shell instances to
think about. The first is the shell which launches the 'xargs' command
(this might be the shell into which you are typing, for example). The
second is the shell launched by 'xargs' (in fact it will probably launch
several, one after the other, depending on how many files need to be
archived). We'll refer to this second shell as a subshell.

Our example uses the '-c' option of 'sh'. Its argument is a shell
command to be executed by the subshell. Along with the rest of that
command, the $@ is enclosed by single quotes to make sure it is passed
to the subshell without being expanded by the parent shell. It is also
enclosed with double quotes so that the subshell will expand '$@'
correctly even if one of the file names contains a space or newline.

The subshell will use any non-option arguments as positional
parameters (that is, in the expansion of '$@'). Because 'xargs'
launches the 'sh -c' subshell with a list of files, those files will end
up as the expansion of '$@'.

You may also notice the 'move' at the end of the command line. This
is used as the value of '$0' by the subshell. We include it because
otherwise the name of the first file to be moved would be used instead.
If that happened it would not be included in the subshell's expansion of
'$@', and so it wouldn't actually get moved.

Another reason to use the 'sh -c' construct could be to perform
redirection:

find /usr/include -name '*.h' | xargs grep -wl mode_t |
xargs -r sh -c 'exec emacs "$@" < /dev/tty' Emacs

Notice that we use the shell builtin 'exec' here. That's simply
because the subshell needs to do nothing once Emacs has been invoked.
Therefore instead of keeping a 'sh' process around for no reason, we
just arrange for the subshell to exec Emacs, saving an extra process
creation.

Sometimes, though, it can be helpful to keep the shell process
around:

find /foo -maxdepth 1 -atime +366 -print0 |
xargs -r0 sh -c 'mv "$@" /archive || exit 255' move

Here, the shell will exit with status 255 if any 'mv' failed. This
causes 'xargs' to stop immediately.

File: find.info, Node: Regular Expressions, Next: Environment Variables, Prev: Invoking xargs, Up: Reference

8.5 Regular Expressions
=======================

The '-regex' and '-iregex' tests of 'find' allow matching by regular
expression, as does the '--regex' option of 'locate'.

Your locale configuration affects how regular expressions are
interpreted. *Note Environment Variables::, for a description of how
your locale setup affects the interpretation of regular expressions.

There are also several different types of regular expression, and
these are interpreted differently. Normally, the type of regular
expression used by 'find' and 'locate' is the same as is used in GNU
Emacs. Both programs provide an option which allows you to select an
alternative regular expression syntax; for 'find' this is the
'-regextype' option, and for 'locate' this is the '--regextype' option.

These options take a single argument, which indicates the specific
regular expression syntax and behaviour that should be used. This
should be one of the following:

* Menu:

* findutils-default regular expression syntax::
* awk regular expression syntax::
* egrep regular expression syntax::
* emacs regular expression syntax::
* gnu-awk regular expression syntax::
* grep regular expression syntax::
* posix-awk regular expression syntax::
* posix-basic regular expression syntax::
* posix-egrep regular expression syntax::
* posix-extended regular expression syntax::

File: find.info, Node: findutils-default regular expression syntax, Next: awk regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.1 'findutils-default' regular expression syntax
---------------------------------------------------

The character '.' matches any single character.

'+'
indicates that the regular expression should match one or more
occurrences of the previous atom or regexp.
'?'
indicates that the regular expression should match zero or one
occurrence of the previous atom or regexp.
'\+'
matches a '+'
'\?'
matches a '?'.

Bracket expressions are used to match ranges of characters. Bracket
expressions where the range is backward, for example '[z-a]', are
ignored. Within square brackets, '\' is taken literally. Character
classes are not supported, so for example you would need to use '[0-9]'
instead of '[[:digit:]]'.

GNU extensions are supported:

1. '\w' matches a character within a word

2. '\W' matches a character which is not within a word

3. '\<' matches the beginning of a word

4. '\>' matches the end of a word

5. '\b' matches a word boundary

6. '\B' matches characters which are not a word boundary

7. '\`' matches the beginning of the whole input

8. '\'' matches the end of the whole input

Grouping is performed with backslashes followed by parentheses '$',
'$'. A backslash followed by a digit acts as a back-reference and
matches the same thing as the previous grouped expression indicated by
that number. For example '\2' matches the second group expression. The
order of group expressions is determined by the position of their
opening parenthesis '\('.

The alternation operator is '\|'.

The character '^' only represents the beginning of a string when it
appears:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '\('

3. After the alternation operator '\|'

The character '$' only represents the end of a string when it
appears:

1. At the end of a regular expression

2. Before a close-group, signified by '\)'
3. Before the alternation operator '\|'

'*', '+' and '?' are special at any point in a regular expression
except:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '\('
3. After the alternation operator '\|'

The longest possible match is returned; this applies to the regular
expression as a whole and (subject to this constraint) to subexpressions
within groups.

File: find.info, Node: awk regular expression syntax, Next: egrep regular expression syntax, Prev: findutils-default regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.2 'awk' regular expression syntax
-------------------------------------

The character '.' matches any single character except the null
character.

Bracket expressions are used to match ranges of characters. Bracket
expressions where the range is backward, for example '[z-a]', are
invalid. Within square brackets, '\' can be used to quote the following
character. Character classes are supported; for example '[[:digit:]]'
will match a single decimal digit.

GNU extensions are not supported and so '\w', '\W', '\<', '\>', '\b',
'\B', '\`', and '\'' match 'w', 'W', '<', '>', 'b', 'B', '`', and '''
respectively.

Grouping is performed with parentheses '()'. An unmatched ')'
matches just itself. A backslash followed by a digit matches that
digit.

The alternation operator is '|'.

The characters '^' and '$' always represent the beginning and end of
a string respectively, except within square brackets. Within brackets,
'^' can be used to invert the membership of the character class being
specified.

'*', '+' and '?' are special at any point in a regular expression
except:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '('
3. After the alternation operator '|'

The longest possible match is returned; this applies to the regular
expression as a whole and (subject to this constraint) to subexpressions
within groups.

File: find.info, Node: egrep regular expression syntax, Next: emacs regular expression syntax, Prev: awk regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.3 'egrep' regular expression syntax
---------------------------------------

The character '.' matches any single character.

Bracket expressions are used to match ranges of characters. Bracket
expressions where the range is backward, for example '[z-a]', are
invalid. Within square brackets, '\' is taken literally. Character
classes are supported; for example '[[:digit:]]' will match a single
decimal digit.

GNU extensions are supported:

1. '\w' matches a character within a word

2. '\W' matches a character which is not within a word

3. '\<' matches the beginning of a word

4. '\>' matches the end of a word

5. '\b' matches a word boundary

6. '\B' matches characters which are not a word boundary

7. '\`' matches the beginning of the whole input

8. '\'' matches the end of the whole input

Grouping is performed with parentheses '()'. An unmatched ')'
matches just itself. A backslash followed by a digit acts as a
back-reference and matches the same thing as the previous grouped
expression indicated by that number. For example '\2' matches the
second group expression. The order of group expressions is determined
by the position of their opening parenthesis '('.

The alternation operator is '|'.

The characters '*', '+' and '?' are special anywhere in a regular
expression.

Intervals are specified by '{' and '}'. Invalid intervals are
treated as literals, for example 'a{1' is treated as 'a\{1'

The longest possible match is returned; this applies to the regular
expression as a whole and (subject to this constraint) to subexpressions
within groups.

File: find.info, Node: emacs regular expression syntax, Next: gnu-awk regular expression syntax, Prev: egrep regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.4 'emacs' regular expression syntax
---------------------------------------

The character '.' matches any single character except newline.

GNU extensions are supported:

1. '\w' matches a character within a word

2. '\W' matches a character which is not within a word

3. '\<' matches the beginning of a word

4. '\>' matches the end of a word

5. '\b' matches a word boundary

6. '\B' matches characters which are not a word boundary

7. '\`' matches the beginning of the whole input

8. '\'' matches the end of the whole input

The alternation operator is '\|'.

The character '^' only represents the beginning of a string when it
appears:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '\('

3. After the alternation operator '\|'

The character '$' only represents the end of a string when it
appears:

1. At the end of a regular expression

2. Before a close-group, signified by '\)'
3. Before the alternation operator '\|'

'*', '+' and '?' are special at any point in a regular expression
except:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '\('
3. After the alternation operator '\|'

The longest possible match is returned; this applies to the regular
expression as a whole and (subject to this constraint) to subexpressions
within groups.

File: find.info, Node: gnu-awk regular expression syntax, Next: grep regular expression syntax, Prev: emacs regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.5 'gnu-awk' regular expression syntax
-----------------------------------------

The character '.' matches any single character.

GNU extensions are supported:

1. '\w' matches a character within a word

2. '\W' matches a character which is not within a word

3. '\<' matches the beginning of a word

4. '\>' matches the end of a word

5. '\b' matches a word boundary

6. '\B' matches characters which are not a word boundary

7. '\`' matches the beginning of the whole input

8. '\'' matches the end of the whole input

The alternation operator is '|'.

'*', '+' and '?' are special at any point in a regular expression
except:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '('
3. After the alternation operator '|'

Intervals are specified by '{' and '}'. Invalid intervals are
treated as literals, for example 'a{1' is treated as 'a\{1'

The longest possible match is returned; this applies to the regular
expression as a whole and (subject to this constraint) to subexpressions
within groups.

File: find.info, Node: grep regular expression syntax, Next: posix-awk regular expression syntax, Prev: gnu-awk regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.6 'grep' regular expression syntax
--------------------------------------

The character '.' matches any single character.

'\+'
indicates that the regular expression should match one or more
occurrences of the previous atom or regexp.
'\?'
indicates that the regular expression should match zero or one
occurrence of the previous atom or regexp.
'+ and ?'
match themselves.

GNU extensions are supported:

1. '\w' matches a character within a word

2. '\W' matches a character which is not within a word

3. '\<' matches the beginning of a word

4. '\>' matches the end of a word

5. '\b' matches a word boundary

6. '\B' matches characters which are not a word boundary

7. '\`' matches the beginning of the whole input

8. '\'' matches the end of the whole input

The alternation operator is '\|'.

The character '^' only represents the beginning of a string when it
appears:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '\('

3. After a newline

4. After the alternation operator '\|'

The character '$' only represents the end of a string when it
appears:

1. At the end of a regular expression

2. Before a close-group, signified by '\)'
3. Before a newline

4. Before the alternation operator '\|'

'\*', '\+' and '\?' are special at any point in a regular expression
except:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '\('
3. After a newline

4. After the alternation operator '\|'

Intervals are specified by '\{' and '\}'. Invalid intervals such as
'a\{1z' are not accepted.

The longest possible match is returned; this applies to the regular
expression as a whole and (subject to this constraint) to subexpressions
within groups.

File: find.info, Node: posix-awk regular expression syntax, Next: posix-basic regular expression syntax, Prev: grep regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.7 'posix-awk' regular expression syntax
-------------------------------------------

The character '.' matches any single character except the null
character.

GNU extensions are not supported and so '\w', '\W', '\<', '\>', '\b',
'\B', '\`', and '\'' match 'w', 'W', '<', '>', 'b', 'B', '`', and '''
respectively.

The alternation operator is '|'.

'*', '+' and '?' are special at any point in a regular expression
except the following places, where they are not allowed:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '('
3. After the alternation operator '|'

Intervals are specified by '{' and '}'. Invalid intervals are
treated as literals, for example 'a{1' is treated as 'a\{1'

The longest possible match is returned; this applies to the regular
expression as a whole and (subject to this constraint) to subexpressions
within groups.

File: find.info, Node: posix-basic regular expression syntax, Next: posix-egrep regular expression syntax, Prev: posix-awk regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.8 'posix-basic' regular expression syntax
---------------------------------------------

This is a synonym for ed.

File: find.info, Node: posix-egrep regular expression syntax, Next: posix-extended regular expression syntax, Prev: posix-basic regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.9 'posix-egrep' regular expression syntax
---------------------------------------------

This is a synonym for egrep.

File: find.info, Node: posix-extended regular expression syntax, Prev: posix-egrep regular expression syntax, Up: Regular Expressions

8.5.10 'posix-extended' regular expression syntax
-------------------------------------------------

The character '.' matches any single character except the null
character.

GNU extensions are supported:

1. '\w' matches a character within a word

2. '\W' matches a character which is not within a word

3. '\<' matches the beginning of a word

4. '\>' matches the end of a word

5. '\b' matches a word boundary

6. '\B' matches characters which are not a word boundary

7. '\`' matches the beginning of the whole input

8. '\'' matches the end of the whole input

The alternation operator is '|'.

'*', '+' and '?' are special at any point in a regular expression
except the following places, where they are not allowed:

1. At the beginning of a regular expression

2. After an open-group, signified by '('
3. After the alternation operator '|'

Intervals are specified by '{' and '}'. Invalid intervals such as
'a{1z' are not accepted.

The longest possible match is returned; this applies to the regular
expression as a whole and (subject to this constraint) to subexpressions
within groups.

File: find.info, Node: Environment Variables, Prev: Regular Expressions, Up: Reference

8.6 Environment Variables
=========================

'LANG'
Provides a default value for the internationalisation variables
that are unset or null.

'LC_ALL'
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the
other internationalisation variables.

'LC_COLLATE'
The POSIX standard specifies that this variable affects the pattern
matching to be used for the '\-name' option. GNU find uses the GNU
version of the 'fnmatch' library function.

This variable also affects the interpretation of the response to
'-ok'; while the 'LC_MESSAGES' variable selects the actual pattern
used to interpret the response to '-ok', the interpretation of any
bracket expressions in the pattern will be affected by the
'LC_COLLATE' variable.

'LC_CTYPE'
This variable affects the treatment of character classes used in
regular expression and with the '-name' test, if the 'fnmatch'
function supports this.

This variable also affects the interpretation of any character
classes in the regular expressions used to interpret the response
to the prompt issued by '-ok'. The 'LC_CTYPE' environment variable
will also affect which characters are considered to be unprintable
when filenames are printed (*note Unusual Characters in File
Names::).

'LC_MESSAGES'
Determines the locale to be used for internationalised messages,
including the interpretation of the response to the prompt made by
the '-ok' action.

'NLSPATH'
Determines the location of the internationalisation message
catalogues.

'PATH'
Affects the directories which are searched to find the executables
invoked by '-exec', '-execdir' '-ok' and '-okdir'. If the PATH
environment variable includes the current directory (by explicitly
including '.' or by having an empty element), and the find command
line includes '-execdir' or '-okdir', 'find' will refuse to run.
*Note Security Considerations::, for a more detailed discussion of
security matters.

'POSIXLY_CORRECT'
Determines the block size used by '-ls' and '-fls'. If
'POSIXLY_CORRECT' is set, blocks are units of 512 bytes. Otherwise
they are units of 1024 bytes.

Setting this variable also turns off warning messages (that is,
implies '-nowarn') by default, because POSIX requires that apart
from the output for '-ok', all messages printed on stderr are
diagnostics and must result in a non-zero exit status.

When 'POSIXLY_CORRECT' is set, the response to the prompt made by
the '-ok' action is interpreted according to the system's message
catalogue, as opposed to according to 'find''s own message
translations.

'TZ'
Affects the time zone used for some of the time-related format
directives of '-printf' and '-fprintf'.

File: find.info, Node: Common Tasks, Next: Worked Examples, Prev: Reference, Up: Top

9 Common Tasks
**************

The sections that follow contain some extended examples that both give a
good idea of the power of these programs, and show you how to solve
common real-world problems.

* Menu:

* Viewing And Editing::
* Archiving::
* Cleaning Up::
* Strange File Names::
* Fixing Permissions::
* Classifying Files::

File: find.info, Node: Viewing And Editing, Next: Archiving, Up: Common Tasks

9.1 Viewing And Editing
=======================

To view a list of files that meet certain criteria, simply run your file
viewing program with the file names as arguments. Shells substitute a
command enclosed in backquotes with its output, so the whole command
looks like this:

less `find /usr/include -name '*.h' | xargs grep -l mode_t`

You can edit those files by giving an editor name instead of a file
viewing program:

emacs `find /usr/include -name '*.h' | xargs grep -l mode_t`

Because there is a limit to the length of any individual command
line, there is a limit to the number of files that can be handled in
this way. We can get around this difficulty by using 'xargs' like this:

find /usr/include -name '*.h' | xargs grep -l mode_t > todo
xargs --arg-file=todo emacs

Here, 'xargs' will run 'emacs' as many times as necessary to visit
all of the files listed in the file 'todo'. Generating a temporary file
is not always convenient, though. This command does much the same thing
without needing one:

find /usr/include -name '*.h' | xargs grep -l mode_t |
xargs sh -c 'emacs "$@" < /dev/tty' Emacs

The example above illustrates a useful trick; Using 'sh -c' you can
invoke a shell command from 'xargs'. The '$@' in the command line is
expanded by the shell to a list of arguments as provided by 'xargs'.
The single quotes in the command line protect the '$@' against expansion
by your interactive shell (which will normally have no arguments and
thus expand '$@' to nothing). The capitalised 'Emacs' on the command
line is used as '$0' by the shell that 'xargs' launches.

File: find.info, Node: Archiving, Next: Cleaning Up, Prev: Viewing And Editing, Up: Common Tasks

9.2 Archiving
=============

You can pass a list of files produced by 'find' to a file archiving
program. GNU 'tar' and 'cpio' can both read lists of file names from
the standard input - either delimited by nulls (the safe way) or by
blanks (the lazy, risky default way). To use null-delimited names, give
them the '--null' option. You can store a file archive in a file, write
it on a tape, or send it over a network to extract on another machine.

One common use of 'find' to archive files is to send a list of the
files in a directory tree to 'cpio'. Use '-depth' so if a directory
does not have write permission for its owner, its contents can still be
restored from the archive since the directory's permissions are restored
after its contents. Here is an example of doing this using 'cpio'; you
could use a more complex 'find' expression to archive only certain
files.

find . -depth -print0 |
cpio --create --null --format=crc --file=/dev/nrst0

You could restore that archive using this command:

cpio --extract --null --make-dir --unconditional \
--preserve --file=/dev/nrst0

Here are the commands to do the same things using 'tar':

find . -depth -print0 |
tar --create --null --files-from=- --file=/dev/nrst0

tar --extract --null --preserve-perm --same-owner \
--file=/dev/nrst0

Here is an example of copying a directory from one machine to
another:

find . -depth -print0 | cpio -0o -Hnewc |
rsh OTHER-MACHINE "cd `pwd` && cpio -i0dum"

File: find.info, Node: Cleaning Up, Next: Strange File Names, Prev: Archiving, Up: Common Tasks

9.3 Cleaning Up
===============

This section gives examples of removing unwanted files in various
situations. Here is a command to remove the CVS backup files created
when an update requires a merge:

find . -name '.#*' -print0 | xargs -0r rm -f

If your 'find' command removes directories, you may find that you get
a spurious error message when 'find' tries to recurse into a directory
that has now been removed. Using the '-depth' option will normally
resolve this problem.

It is also possible to use the '-delete' action:

find . -depth -name '.#*' -delete

You can run this command to clean out your clutter in '/tmp'. You
might place it in the file your shell runs when you log out
('.bash_logout', '.logout', or '.zlogout', depending on which shell you
use).

find /tmp -depth -user "$LOGNAME" -type f -delete

To remove old Emacs backup and auto-save files, you can use a command
like the following. It is especially important in this case to use
null-terminated file names because Emacs packages like the VM mailer
often create temporary file names with spaces in them, like '#reply to
David J. MacKenzie<1>#'.

find ~ $ -name '*~' -o -name '#*#' $ -print0 |
xargs --no-run-if-empty --null rm -vf

Removing old files from '/tmp' is commonly done from 'cron':

find /tmp /var/tmp -depth -not -type d -mtime +3 -delete
find /tmp /var/tmp -depth -mindepth 1 -type d -empty -delete

The second 'find' command above cleans out empty directories
depth-first ('-delete' implies '-depth' anyway), hoping that the parents
become empty and can be removed too. It uses '-mindepth' to avoid
removing '/tmp' itself if it becomes totally empty.

Lastly, an example of a program that almost certainly does not do
what the user intended:

find dirname -delete -name quux

If the user hoped to delete only files named 'quux' they will get an
unpleasant surprise; this command will attempt to delete everything at
or below the starting point 'dirname'. This is because 'find' evaluates
the items on the command line as an expression. The 'find' program will
normally execute an action if the preceding action succeeds. Here,
there is no action or test before the '-delete' so it will always be
executed. The '-name quux' test will be performed for files we
successfully deleted, but that test has no effect since '-delete' also
disables the default '-print' operation. So the above example will
probably delete a lot of files the user didn't want to delete.

This command is also likely to do something you did not intend:
find dirname -path dirname/foo -prune -o -delete

Because '-delete' turns on '-depth', the '-prune' action has no
effect and files in 'dirname/foo' will be deleted too.

File: find.info, Node: Strange File Names, Next: Fixing Permissions, Prev: Cleaning Up, Up: Common Tasks

9.4 Strange File Names
======================

'find' can help you remove or rename a file with strange characters in
its name. People are sometimes stymied by files whose names contain
characters such as spaces, tabs, control characters, or characters with
the high bit set. The simplest way to remove such files is:

rm -i SOME*PATTERN*THAT*MATCHES*THE*PROBLEM*FILE

'rm' asks you whether to remove each file matching the given pattern.
If you are using an old shell, this approach might not work if the file
name contains a character with the high bit set; the shell may strip it
off. A more reliable way is:

find . -maxdepth 1 TESTS -okdir rm '{}' \;

where TESTS uniquely identify the file. The '-maxdepth 1' option
prevents 'find' from wasting time searching for the file in any
subdirectories; if there are no subdirectories, you may omit it. A good
way to uniquely identify the problem file is to figure out its inode
number; use

ls -i

Suppose you have a file whose name contains control characters, and
you have found that its inode number is 12345. This command prompts you
for whether to remove it:

find . -maxdepth 1 -inum 12345 -okdir rm -f '{}' \;

If you don't want to be asked, perhaps because the file name may
contain a strange character sequence that will mess up your screen when
printed, then use '-execdir' instead of '-okdir'.

If you want to rename the file instead, you can use 'mv' instead of
'rm':

find . -maxdepth 1 -inum 12345 -okdir mv '{}' NEW-FILE-NAME \;

File: find.info, Node: Fixing Permissions, Next: Classifying Files, Prev: Strange File Names, Up: Common Tasks

9.5 Fixing Permissions
======================

Suppose you want to make sure that everyone can write to the directories
in a certain directory tree. Here is a way to find directories lacking
either user or group write permission (or both), and fix their
permissions:

find . -type d -not -perm -ug=w | xargs chmod ug+w

You could also reverse the operations, if you want to make sure that
directories do _not_ have world write permission.

File: find.info, Node: Classifying Files, Prev: Fixing Permissions, Up: Common Tasks

9.6 Classifying Files
=====================

If you want to classify a set of files into several groups based on
different criteria, you can use the comma operator to perform multiple
independent tests on the files. Here is an example:

find / -type d $ -perm -o=w -fprint allwrite , \
-perm -o=x -fprint allexec $

echo "Directories that can be written to by everyone:"
cat allwrite
echo ""
echo "Directories with search permissions for everyone:"
cat allexec

'find' has only to make one scan through the directory tree (which is
one of the most time consuming parts of its work).

File: find.info, Node: Worked Examples, Next: Security Considerations, Prev: Common Tasks, Up: Top

10 Worked Examples
******************

The tools in the findutils package, and in particular 'find', have a
large number of options. This means that quite often, there is more
than one way to do things. Some of the options and facilities only
exist for compatibility with other tools, and findutils provides
improved ways of doing things.

This chapter describes a number of useful tasks that are commonly
performed, and compares the different ways of achieving them.

* Menu:

* Deleting Files::
* Copying A Subset of Files::
* Updating A Timestamp File::
* Finding the Shallowest Instance::

File: find.info, Node: Deleting Files, Next: Copying A Subset of Files, Up: Worked Examples

10.1 Deleting Files
===================

One of the most common tasks that 'find' is used for is locating files
that can be deleted. This might include:

* Files last modified more than 3 years ago which haven't been
accessed for at least 2 years
* Files belonging to a certain user
* Temporary files which are no longer required

This example concentrates on the actual deletion task rather than on
sophisticated ways of locating the files that need to be deleted. We'll
assume that the files we want to delete are old files underneath
'/var/tmp/stuff'.

10.1.1 The Traditional Way
--------------------------

The traditional way to delete files in '/var/tmp/stuff' that have not
been modified in over 90 days would have been:

find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -exec /bin/rm {} \;

The above command uses '-exec' to run the '/bin/rm' command to remove
each file. This approach works and in fact would have worked in Version
7 Unix in 1979. However, there are a number of problems with this
approach.

The most obvious problem with the approach above is that it causes
'find' to fork every time it finds a file that needs to delete, and the
child process then has to use the 'exec' system call to launch
'/bin/rm'. All this is quite inefficient. If we are going to use
'/bin/rm' to do this job, it is better to make it delete more than one
file at a time.

The most obvious way of doing this is to use the shell's command
expansion feature:

/bin/rm `find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -print`
or you could use the more modern form
/bin/rm $(find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -print)

The commands above are much more efficient than the first attempt.
However, there is a problem with them. The shell has a maximum command
length which is imposed by the operating system (the actual limit varies
between systems). This means that while the command expansion technique
will usually work, it will suddenly fail when there are lots of files to
delete. Since the task is to delete unwanted files, this is precisely
the time we don't want things to go wrong.

10.1.2 Making Use of 'xargs'
----------------------------

So, is there a way to be more efficient in the use of 'fork()' and
'exec()' without running up against this limit? Yes, we can be almost
optimally efficient by making use of the 'xargs' command. The 'xargs'
command reads arguments from its standard input and builds them into
command lines. We can use it like this:

find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -print | xargs /bin/rm

For example if the files found by 'find' are '/var/tmp/stuff/A',
'/var/tmp/stuff/B' and '/var/tmp/stuff/C' then 'xargs' might issue the
commands

/bin/rm /var/tmp/stuff/A /var/tmp/stuff/B
/bin/rm /var/tmp/stuff/C

The above assumes that 'xargs' has a very small maximum command line
length. The real limit is much larger but the idea is that 'xargs' will
run '/bin/rm' as many times as necessary to get the job done, given the
limits on command line length.

This usage of 'xargs' is pretty efficient, and the 'xargs' command is
widely implemented (all modern versions of Unix offer it). So far then,
the news is all good. However, there is bad news too.

10.1.3 Unusual characters in filenames
--------------------------------------

Unix-like systems allow any characters to appear in file names with the
exception of the ASCII NUL character and the slash. Slashes can occur
in path names (as the directory separator) but not in the names of
actual directory entries. This means that the list of files that
'xargs' reads could in fact contain white space characters - spaces,
tabs and newline characters. Since by default, 'xargs' assumes that the
list of files it is reading uses white space as an argument separator,
it cannot correctly handle the case where a filename actually includes
white space. This makes the default behaviour of 'xargs' almost useless
for handling arbitrary data.

To solve this problem, GNU findutils introduced the '-print0' action
for 'find'. This uses the ASCII NUL character to separate the entries
in the file list that it produces. This is the ideal choice of
separator since it is the only character that cannot appear within a
path name. The '-0' option to 'xargs' makes it assume that arguments
are separated with ASCII NUL instead of white space. It also turns off
another misfeature in the default behaviour of 'xargs', which is that it
pays attention to quote characters in its input. Some versions of
'xargs' also terminate when they see a lone '_' in the input, but GNU
'find' no longer does that (since it has become an optional behaviour in
the Unix standard).

So, putting 'find -print0' together with 'xargs -0' we get this
command:

find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm

The result is an efficient way of proceeding that correctly handles
all the possible characters that could appear in the list of files to
delete. This is good news. However, there is, as I'm sure you're
expecting, also more bad news. The problem is that this is not a
portable construct; although other versions of Unix (notably BSD-derived
ones) support '-print0', it's not universal. So, is there a more
universal mechanism?

10.1.4 Going back to '-exec'
----------------------------

There is indeed a more universal mechanism, which is a slight
modification to the '-exec' action. The normal '-exec' action assumes
that the command to run is terminated with a semicolon (the semicolon
normally has to be quoted in order to protect it from interpretation as
the shell command separator). The SVR4 edition of Unix introduced a
slight variation, which involves terminating the command with '+'
instead:

find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -exec /bin/rm {} \+

The above use of '-exec' causes 'find' to build up a long command
line and then issue it. This can be less efficient than some uses of
'xargs'; for example 'xargs' allows new command lines to be built up
while the previous command is still executing, and allows you to specify
a number of commands to run in parallel. However, the 'find ... -exec
... +' construct has the advantage of wide portability. GNU findutils
did not support '-exec ... +' until version 4.2.12; one of the reasons
for this is that it already had the '-print0' action in any case.

10.1.5 A more secure version of '-exec'
---------------------------------------

The command above seems to be efficient and portable. However, within
it lurks a security problem. The problem is shared with all the
commands we've tried in this worked example so far, too. The security
problem is a race condition; that is, if it is possible for somebody to
manipulate the filesystem that you are searching while you are searching
it, it is possible for them to persuade your 'find' command to cause the
deletion of a file that you can delete but they normally cannot.

The problem occurs because the '-exec' action is defined by the POSIX
standard to invoke its command with the same working directory as 'find'
had when it was started. This means that the arguments which replace
the {} include a relative path from 'find''s starting point down the
file that needs to be deleted. For example,

find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -exec /bin/rm {} \+

might actually issue the command:

/bin/rm /var/tmp/stuff/A /var/tmp/stuff/B /var/tmp/stuff/passwd

Notice the file '/var/tmp/stuff/passwd'. Likewise, the command:

cd /var/tmp && find stuff -mtime +90 -exec /bin/rm {} \+

might actually issue the command:

/bin/rm stuff/A stuff/B stuff/passwd

If an attacker can rename 'stuff' to something else (making use of
their write permissions in '/var/tmp') they can replace it with a
symbolic link to '/etc'. That means that the '/bin/rm' command will be
invoked on '/etc/passwd'. If you are running your 'find' command as
root, the attacker has just managed to delete a vital file. All they
needed to do to achieve this was replace a subdirectory with a symbolic
link at the vital moment.

There is however, a simple solution to the problem. This is an
action which works a lot like '-exec' but doesn't need to traverse a
chain of directories to reach the file that it needs to work on. This
is the '-execdir' action, which was introduced by the BSD family of
operating systems. The command,

find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -execdir /bin/rm {} \+

might delete a set of files by performing these actions:

1. Change directory to /var/tmp/stuff/foo
2. Invoke '/bin/rm ./file1 ./file2 ./file3'
3. Change directory to /var/tmp/stuff/bar
4. Invoke '/bin/rm ./file99 ./file100 ./file101'

This is a much more secure method. We are no longer exposed to a
race condition. For many typical uses of 'find', this is the best
strategy. It's reasonably efficient, but the length of the command line
is limited not just by the operating system limits, but also by how many
files we actually need to delete from each directory.

Is it possible to do any better? In the case of general file
processing, no. However, in the specific case of deleting files it is
indeed possible to do better.

10.1.6 Using the '-delete' action
---------------------------------

The most efficient and secure method of solving this problem is to use
the '-delete' action:

find /var/tmp/stuff -mtime +90 -delete

This alternative is more efficient than any of the '-exec' or
'-execdir' actions, since it entirely avoids the overhead of forking a
new process and using 'exec' to run '/bin/rm'. It is also normally more
efficient than 'xargs' for the same reason. The file deletion is
performed from the directory containing the entry to be deleted, so the
'-delete' action has the same security advantages as the '-execdir'
action has.

The '-delete' action was introduced by the BSD family of operating
systems.

10.1.7 Improving things still further
-------------------------------------

Is it possible to improve things still further? Not without either
modifying the system library to the operating system or having more
specific knowledge of the layout of the filesystem and disk I/O
subsystem, or both.

The 'find' command traverses the filesystem, reading directories. It
then issues a separate system call for each file to be deleted. If we
could modify the operating system, there are potential gains that could
be made:

* We could have a system call to which we pass more than one filename
for deletion
* Alternatively, we could pass in a list of inode numbers (on
GNU/Linux systems, 'readdir()' also returns the inode number of
each directory entry) to be deleted.

The above possibilities sound interesting, but from the kernel's
point of view it is difficult to enforce standard Unix access controls
for such processing by inode number. Such a facility would probably
need to be restricted to the superuser.

Another way of improving performance would be to increase the
parallelism of the process. For example if the directory hierarchy we
are searching is actually spread across a number of disks, we might
somehow be able to arrange for 'find' to process each disk in parallel.
In practice GNU 'find' doesn't have such an intimate understanding of
the system's filesystem layout and disk I/O subsystem.

However, since the system administrator can have such an
understanding they can take advantage of it like so:

find /var/tmp/stuff1 -mtime +90 -delete &
find /var/tmp/stuff2 -mtime +90 -delete &
find /var/tmp/stuff3 -mtime +90 -delete &
find /var/tmp/stuff4 -mtime +90 -delete &
wait

In the example above, four separate instances of 'find' are used to
search four subdirectories in parallel. The 'wait' command simply waits
for all of these to complete. Whether this approach is more or less
efficient than a single instance of 'find' depends on a number of
things:

* Are the directories being searched in parallel actually on separate
disks? If not, this parallel search might just result in a lot of
disk head movement and so the speed might even be slower.
* Other activity - are other programs also doing things on those
disks?

10.1.8 Conclusion
-----------------

The fastest and most secure way to delete files with the help of 'find'
is to use '-delete'. Using 'xargs -0 -P N' can also make effective use
of the disk, but it is not as secure.

In the case where we're doing things other than deleting files, the
most secure alternative is '-execdir ... +', but this is not as portable
as the insecure action '-exec ... +'.

The '-delete' action is not completely portable, but the only other
possibility which is as secure ('-execdir') is no more portable. The
most efficient portable alternative is '-exec ...+', but this is
insecure and isn't supported by versions of GNU findutils prior to
4.2.12.

File: find.info, Node: Copying A Subset of Files, Next: Updating A Timestamp File, Prev: Deleting Files, Up: Worked Examples

10.2 Copying A Subset of Files
==============================

Suppose you want to copy some files from '/source-dir' to '/dest-dir',
but there are a small number of files in '/source-dir' you don't want to
copy.

One option of course is 'cp /source-dir /dest-dir' followed by
deletion of the unwanted material under '/dest-dir'. But often that can
be inconvenient, because for example we would have copied a large amount
of extraneous material, or because '/dest-dir' is too small. Naturally
there are many other possible reasons why this strategy may be
unsuitable.

So we need to have some way of identifying which files we want to
copy, and we need to have a way of copying that file list. The second
part of this condition is met by 'cpio -p'. Of course, we can identify
the files we wish to copy by using 'find'. Here is a command that
solves our problem:

cd /source-dir
find . -name '.snapshot' -prune -o $ \! -name '*~' -print0 $ |
cpio -pmd0 /dest-dir

The first part of the 'find' command here identifies files or
directories named '.snapshot' and tells 'find' not to recurse into them
(since they do not need to be copied). The combination '-name
'.snapshot' -prune' yields false for anything that didn't get pruned,
but it is exactly those files we want to copy. Therefore we need to use
an OR ('-o') condition to introduce the rest of our expression. The
remainder of the expression simply arranges for the name of any file not
ending in '~' to be printed.

Using '-print0' ensures that white space characters in file names do
not pose a problem. The 'cpio' command does the actual work of copying
files. The program as a whole fails if the 'cpio' program returns
nonzero. If the 'find' command returns non-zero on the other hand, the
Unix shell will not diagnose a problem (since 'find' is not the last
command in the pipeline).

File: find.info, Node: Updating A Timestamp File, Next: Finding the Shallowest Instance, Prev: Copying A Subset of Files, Up: Worked Examples

10.3 Updating A Timestamp File
==============================

Suppose we have a directory full of files which is maintained with a set
of automated tools; perhaps one set of tools updates them and another
set of tools uses the result. In this situation, it might be useful for
the second set of tools to know if the files have recently been changed.
It might be useful, for example, to have a 'timestamp' file which gives
the timestamp on the newest file in the collection.

We can use 'find' to achieve this, but there are several different
ways to do it.

10.3.1 Updating the Timestamp The Wrong Way
-------------------------------------------

The obvious but wrong answer is just to use '-newer':

find subdir -newer timestamp -exec touch -r {} timestamp \;

This does the right sort of thing but has a bug. Suppose that two
files in the subdirectory have been updated, and that these are called
'file1' and 'file2'. The command above will update 'timestamp' with the
modification time of 'file1' or that of 'file2', but we don't know which
one. Since the timestamps on 'file1' and 'file2' will in general be
different, this could well be the wrong value.

One solution to this problem is to modify 'find' to recheck the
modification time of 'timestamp' every time a file is to be compared
against it, but that will reduce the performance of 'find'.

10.3.2 Using the test utility to compare timestamps
---------------------------------------------------

The 'test' command can be used to compare timestamps:

find subdir -exec test {} -nt timestamp \; -exec touch -r {} timestamp \;

This will ensure that any changes made to the modification time of
'timestamp' that take place during the execution of 'find' are taken
into account. This resolves our earlier problem, but unfortunately this
runs much more slowly.

10.3.3 A combined approach
--------------------------

We can of course still use '-newer' to cut down on the number of calls
to 'test':

find subdir -newer timestamp -and \
-exec test {} -nt timestamp \; -and \
-exec touch -r {} timestamp \;

Here, the '-newer' test excludes all the files which are definitely
older than the timestamp, but all the files which are newer than the old
value of the timestamp are compared against the current updated
timestamp.

This is indeed faster in general, but the speed difference will
depend on how many updated files there are.

10.3.4 Using '-printf' and 'sort' to compare timestamps
-------------------------------------------------------

It is possible to use the '-printf' action to abandon the use of 'test'
entirely:

newest=$(find subdir -newer timestamp -printf "%A%p\n" |
sort -n |
tail -1 |
cut -d: -f2- )
touch -r "${newest:-timestamp}" timestamp

The command above works by generating a list of the timestamps and
names of all the files which are newer than the timestamp. The 'sort',
'tail' and 'cut' commands simply pull out the name of the file with the
largest timestamp value (that is, the latest file). The 'touch' command
is then used to update the timestamp,

The '"${newest:-timestamp}"' expression simply expands to the value
of '$newest' if that variable is set, but to 'timestamp' otherwise.
This ensures that an argument is always given to the '-r' option of the
'touch' command.

This approach seems quite efficient, but unfortunately it has a
problem. Many operating systems now keep file modification time
information at a granularity which is finer than one second. Findutils
version 4.3.3 and later will print a fractional part with %A@, but older
versions will not.

10.3.5 Solving the problem with 'make'
--------------------------------------

Another tool which often works with timestamps is 'make'. We can use
'find' to generate a 'Makefile' file on the fly and then use 'make' to
update the timestamps:

makefile=$(mktemp)
find subdir \
$ \! -xtype l $ \
-newer timestamp \
-printf "timestamp:: %p\n\ttouch -r %p timestamp\n\n" > "$makefile"
make -f "$makefile"
rm -f "$makefile"

Unfortunately although the solution above is quite elegant, it fails
to cope with white space within file names, and adjusting it to do so
would require a rather complex shell script.

10.3.6 Coping with odd filenames too
------------------------------------

We can fix both of these problems (looping and problems with white
space), and do things more efficiently too. The following command works
with newlines and doesn't need to sort the list of filenames.

find subdir -newer timestamp -printf "%A@:%p\0" |
perl -0 newest.pl |
xargs --no-run-if-empty --null -i \
find {} -maxdepth 0 -newer timestamp -exec touch -r {} timestamp \;

The first 'find' command generates a list of files which are newer
than the original timestamp file, and prints a list of them with their
timestamps. The 'newest.pl' script simply filters out all the filenames
which have timestamps which are older than whatever the newest file is:

#! /usr/bin/perl -0
my @newest = ();
my $latest_stamp = undef;
while (<>) {
my ($stamp, $name) = split(/:/);
if (!defined($latest_stamp) || ($tstamp > $latest_stamp)) {
$latest_stamp = $stamp;
@newest = ();
}
if ($tstamp >= $latest_stamp) {
push @newest, $name;
}
}
print join("\0", @newest);

This prints a list of zero or more files, all of which are newer than
the original timestamp file, and which have the same timestamp as each
other, to the nearest second. The second 'find' command takes each
resulting file one at a time, and if that is newer than the timestamp
file, the timestamp is updated.

File: find.info, Node: Finding the Shallowest Instance, Prev: Updating A Timestamp File, Up: Worked Examples

10.4 Finding the Shallowest Instance
====================================

Suppose you maintain local copies of sources from various projects, each
with their own choice of directory organisation and source code
management (SCM) tool. You need to periodically synchronize each
project with its upstream tree. As the number local repositories grows,
so does the work involved in maintaining synchronization. SCM utilities
typically create some sort of administrative directory: .svn for
Subversion, CVS for CVS, and so on. These directories can be used as a
key to search for the bases of the project source trees. Suppose we
have the following directory structure:

repo/project1/CVS
repo/gnu/project2/.svn
repo/gnu/project3/.svn
repo/gnu/project3/src/.svn
repo/gnu/project3/doc/.svn
repo/project4/.git

One would expect to update each of the 'projectX' directories, but
not their subdirectories (src, doc, etc.). To locate the project roots,
we would need to find the least deeply nested directories containing an
SCM-related subdirectory. The following command discovers those roots
efficiently. It is efficient because it avoids searching subdirectories
inside projects whose SCM directory we already found.

find repo/ \
-exec test -d {}/.svn \; -or \
-exec test -d {}/.git \; -or \
-exec test -d {}/CVS \; -print -prune

In this example, 'test' is used to tell if we are currently examining
a directory which appears to the a project's root directory (because it
has an SCM subdirectory). When we find a project root, there is no need
to search inside it, and '-prune' makes sure that we descend no further.

For large, complex trees like the Linux kernel, this will prevent
searching a large portion of the structure, saving a good deal of time.

File: find.info, Node: Security Considerations, Next: Error Messages, Prev: Worked Examples, Up: Top

11 Security Considerations
**************************

Security considerations are important if you are using 'find' or 'xargs'
to search for or process files that don't belong to you or which other
people have control. Security considerations relating to 'locate' may
also apply if you have files which you do not want others to see.

The most severe forms of security problems affecting 'find' and
related programs are when third parties bring about a situation allowing
them to do something they would normally not be able to accomplish.
This is called _privilege elevation_. This might include deleting files
they would not normally be able to delete. It is common for the
operating system to periodically invoke 'find' for self-maintenance
purposes. These invocations of 'find' are particularly problematic from
a security point of view as these are often invoked by the superuser and
search the entire filesystem hierarchy. Generally, the severity of any
associated problem depends on what the system is going to do with the
files found by 'find'.

* Menu:

* Levels of Risk:: What is your level of exposure to security problems?
* Security Considerations for find:: Security problems with find
* Security Considerations for xargs:: Security problems with xargs
* Security Considerations for locate:: Security problems with locate
* Security Summary:: That was all very complex, what does it boil down to?
* Further Reading on Security::

File: find.info, Node: Levels of Risk, Next: Security Considerations for find, Up: Security Considerations

11.1 Levels of Risk
===================

There are some security risks inherent in the use of 'find', 'xargs' and
(to a lesser extent) 'locate'. The severity of these risks depends on
what sort of system you are using:

*High risk*
Multi-user systems where you do not control (or trust) the other
users, and on which you execute 'find', including areas where those
other users can manipulate the filesystem (for example beneath
'/home' or '/tmp').

*Medium Risk*
Systems where the actions of other users can create file names
chosen by them, but to which they don't have access while 'find' is
being run. This access might include leaving programs running
(shell background jobs, 'at' or 'cron' tasks, for example). On
these sorts of systems, carefully written commands (avoiding use of
'-print' for example) should not expose you to a high degree of
risk. Most systems fall into this category.

*Low Risk*
Systems to which untrusted parties do not have access, cannot
create file names of their own choice (even remotely) and which
contain no security flaws which might enable an untrusted third
party to gain access. Most systems do not fall into this category
because there are many ways in which external parties can affect
the names of files that are created on your system. The system on
which I am writing this for example automatically downloads
software updates from the Internet; the names of the files in which
these updates exist are chosen by third parties(1).

In the discussion above, "risk" denotes the likelihood that someone
can cause 'find', 'xargs', 'locate' or some other program which is
controlled by them to do something you did not intend. The levels of
risk suggested do not take any account of the consequences of this sort
of event. That is, if you operate a "low risk" type system, but the
consequences of a security problem are disastrous, then you should still
give serious thought to all the possible security problems, many of
which of course will not be discussed here - this section of the manual
is intended to be informative but not comprehensive or exhaustive.

If you are responsible for the operation of a system where the
consequences of a security problem could be very important, you should
do two things:

1. Define a security policy which defines who is allowed to do what on
your system.
2. Seek competent advice on how to enforce your policy, detect
breaches of that policy, and take account of any potential problems
that might fall outside the scope of your policy.

---------- Footnotes ----------

(1) Of course, I trust these parties to a large extent anyway,
because I install software provided by them; I choose to trust them in
this way, and that's a deliberate choice

File: find.info, Node: Security Considerations for find, Next: Security Considerations for xargs, Prev: Levels of Risk, Up: Security Considerations

11.2 Security Considerations for 'find'
=======================================

Some of the actions 'find' might take have a direct effect; these
include '-exec' and '-delete'. However, it is also common to use
'-print' explicitly or implicitly, and so if 'find' produces the wrong
list of file names, that can also be a security problem; consider the
case for example where 'find' is producing a list of files to be
deleted.

We normally assume that the 'find' command line expresses the file
selection criteria and actions that the user had in mind - that is, the
command line is "trusted" data.

From a security analysis point of view, the output of 'find' should
be correct; that is, the output should contain only the names of those
files which meet the user's criteria specified on the command line.
This applies for the '-exec' and '-delete' actions; one can consider
these to be part of the output.

On the other hand, the contents of the filesystem can be manipulated
by other people, and hence we regard this as "untrusted" data. This
implies that the 'find' command line is a filter which converts the
untrusted contents of the filesystem into a correct list of output
files.

The filesystem will in general change while 'find' is searching it;
in fact, most of the potential security problems with 'find' relate to
this issue in some way.

"Race conditions" are a general class of security problem where the
relative ordering of actions taken by 'find' (for example) and something
else are critically important in getting the correct and expected
result(1) .

For 'find', an attacker might move or rename files or directories in
the hope that an action might be taken against a file which was not
normally intended to be affected. Alternatively, this sort of attack
might be intended to persuade 'find' to search part of the filesystem
which would not normally be included in the search (defeating the
'-prune' action for example).

* Menu:

* Problems with -exec and filenames::
* Changing the Current Working Directory::
* Race Conditions with -exec::
* Race Conditions with -print and -print0::

---------- Footnotes ----------

(1) This is more or less the definition of the term "race condition"

File: find.info, Node: Problems with -exec and filenames, Next: Changing the Current Working Directory, Up: Security Considerations for find

11.2.1 Problems with '-exec' and filenames
------------------------------------------

It is safe in many cases to use the '-execdir' action with any file
name. Because '-execdir' prefixes the arguments it passes to programs
with './', you will not accidentally pass an argument which is
interpreted as an option. For example the file '-f' would be passed to
'rm' as './-f', which is harmless.

However, your degree of safety does depend on the nature of the
program you are running. For example constructs such as these two
commands

# risky
find -exec sh -c "something {}" \;
find -execdir sh -c "something {}" \;

are very dangerous. The reason for this is that the '{}' is expanded
to a filename which might contain a semicolon or other characters
special to the shell. If for example someone creates the file
'/tmp/foo; rm -rf $HOME' then the two commands above could delete
someone's home directory.

So for this reason do not run any command which will pass untrusted
data (such as the names of files) to commands which interpret arguments
as commands to be further interpreted (for example 'sh').

In the case of the shell, there is a clever workaround for this
problem:

# safer
find -exec sh -c 'something "$@"' sh {} \;
find -execdir sh -c 'something "$@"' sh {} \;

This approach is not guaranteed to avoid every problem, but it is
much safer than substituting data of an attacker's choice into the text
of a shell command.

File: find.info, Node: Changing the Current Working Directory, Next: Race Conditions with -exec, Prev: Problems with -exec and filenames, Up: Security Considerations for find

11.2.2 Changing the Current Working Directory
---------------------------------------------

As 'find' searches the filesystem, it finds subdirectories and then
searches within them by changing its working directory. First, 'find'
reaches and recognises a subdirectory. It then decides if that
subdirectory meets the criteria for being searched; that is, any '-xdev'
or '-prune' expressions are taken into account. The 'find' program will
then change working directory and proceed to search the directory.

A race condition attack might take the form that once the checks
relevant to '-xdev' and '-prune' have been done, an attacker might
rename the directory that was being considered, and put in its place a
symbolic link that actually points somewhere else.

The idea behind this attack is to fool 'find' into going into the
wrong directory. This would leave 'find' with a working directory
chosen by an attacker, bypassing any protection apparently provided by
'-xdev' and '-prune', and any protection provided by being able to _not_
list particular directories on the 'find' command line. This form of
attack is particularly problematic if the attacker can predict when the
'find' command will be run, as is the case with 'cron' tasks for
example.

GNU 'find' has specific safeguards to prevent this general class of
problem. The exact form of these safeguards depends on the properties
of your system.

* Menu:

* O_NOFOLLOW:: Safely changing directory using 'fchdir'.
* Systems without O_NOFOLLOW:: Checking for symbolic links after 'chdir'.

File: find.info, Node: O_NOFOLLOW, Next: Systems without O_NOFOLLOW, Up: Changing the Current Working Directory

11.2.2.1 'O_NOFOLLOW'
.....................

If your system supports the 'O_NOFOLLOW' flag (1) to the 'open(2)'
system call, 'find' uses it to safely change directories. The target
directory is first opened and then 'find' changes working directory with
the 'fchdir()' system call. This ensures that symbolic links are not
followed, preventing the sort of race condition attack in which use is
made of symbolic links.

If for any reason this approach does not work, 'find' will fall back
on the method which is normally used if 'O_NOFOLLOW' is not supported.

You can tell if your system supports 'O_NOFOLLOW' by running

find --version

This will tell you the version number and which features are enabled.
For example, if I run this on my system now, this gives:
find (GNU findutils) 4.5.11-git
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Eric B. Decker, James Youngman, and Kevin Dalley.
Features enabled: D_TYPE O_NOFOLLOW(enabled) LEAF_OPTIMISATION FTS(FTS_CWDFD) CBO(level=2)

Here, you can see that I am running a version of 'find' which was
built from the development (git) code prior to the release of
findutils-4.5.12, and that several features including 'O_NOFOLLOW' are
present. 'O_NOFOLLOW' is qualified with "enabled". This simply means
that the current system seems to support 'O_NOFOLLOW'. This check is
needed because it is possible to build 'find' on a system that defines
'O_NOFOLLOW' and then run it on a system that ignores the 'O_NOFOLLOW'
flag. We try to detect such cases at startup by checking the operating
system and version number; when this happens you will see
'O_NOFOLLOW(disabled)' instead.

---------- Footnotes ----------

(1) GNU/Linux (kernel version 2.1.126 and later) and FreeBSD
(3.0-CURRENT and later) support this

File: find.info, Node: Systems without O_NOFOLLOW, Prev: O_NOFOLLOW, Up: Changing the Current Working Directory

11.2.2.2 Systems without 'O_NOFOLLOW'
.....................................

The strategy for preventing this type of problem on systems that lack
support for the 'O_NOFOLLOW' flag is more complex. Each time 'find'
changes directory, it examines the directory it is about to move to,
issues the 'chdir()' system call, and then checks that it has ended up
in the subdirectory it expected. If all is as expected, processing
continues as normal. However, there are two main reasons why the
directory might change: the use of an automounter and the someone
removing the old directory and replacing it with something else while
'find' is trying to descend into it.

Where a filesystem "automounter" is in use it can be the case that
the use of the 'chdir()' system call can itself cause a new filesystem
to be mounted at that point. On systems that do not support
'O_NOFOLLOW', this will cause 'find''s security check to fail.

However, this does not normally represent a security problem, since
the automounter configuration is normally set up by the system
administrator. Therefore, if the 'chdir()' sanity check fails, 'find'
will make one more attempt(1). If that succeeds, execution carries on
as normal. This is the usual case for automounters.

Where an attacker is trying to exploit a race condition, the problem
may not have gone away on the second attempt. If this is the case,
'find' will issue a warning message and then ignore that subdirectory.
When this happens, actions such as '-exec' or '-print' may already have
taken place for the problematic subdirectory. This is because 'find'
applies tests and actions to directories before searching within them
(unless '-depth' was specified).

Because of the nature of the directory-change operation and security
check, in the worst case the only things that 'find' would have done
with the directory are to move into it and back out to the original
parent. No operations would have been performed within that directory.

---------- Footnotes ----------

(1) This may not be the case for the fts-based executable

File: find.info, Node: Race Conditions with -exec, Next: Race Conditions with -print and -print0, Prev: Changing the Current Working Directory, Up: Security Considerations for find

11.2.3 Race Conditions with '-exec'
-----------------------------------

The '-exec' action causes another program to be run. It passes to the
program the name of the file which is being considered at the time. The
invoked program will typically then perform some action on that file.
Once again, there is a race condition which can be exploited here. We
shall take as a specific example the command

find /tmp -path /tmp/umsp/passwd -exec /bin/rm

In this simple example, we are identifying just one file to be
deleted and invoking '/bin/rm' to delete it. A problem exists because
there is a time gap between the point where 'find' decides that it needs
to process the '-exec' action and the point where the '/bin/rm' command
actually issues the 'unlink()' system call to delete the file from the
filesystem. Within this time period, an attacker can rename the
'/tmp/umsp' directory, replacing it with a symbolic link to '/etc'.
There is no way for '/bin/rm' to determine that it is working on the
same file that 'find' had in mind. Once the symbolic link is in place,
the attacker has persuaded 'find' to cause the deletion of the
'/etc/passwd' file, which is not the effect intended by the command
which was actually invoked.

One possible defence against this type of attack is to modify the
behaviour of '-exec' so that the '/bin/rm' command is run with the
argument './passwd' and a suitable choice of working directory. This
would allow the normal sanity check that 'find' performs to protect
against this form of attack too. Unfortunately, this strategy cannot be
used as the POSIX standard specifies that the current working directory
for commands invoked with '-exec' must be the same as the current
working directory from which 'find' was invoked. This means that the
'-exec' action is inherently insecure and can't be fixed.

GNU 'find' implements a more secure variant of the '-exec' action,
'-execdir'. The '-execdir' action ensures that it is not necessary to
dereference subdirectories to process target files. The current
directory used to invoke programs is the same as the directory in which
the file to be processed exists ('/tmp/umsp' in our example, and only
the basename of the file to be processed is passed to the invoked
command, with a './' prepended (giving './passwd' in our example).

The '-execdir' action refuses to do anything if the current directory
is included in the $PATH environment variable. This is necessary
because '-execdir' runs programs in the same directory in which it finds
files - in general, such a directory might be writable by untrusted
users. For similar reasons, '-execdir' does not allow '{}' to appear in
the name of the command to be run.

File: find.info, Node: Race Conditions with -print and -print0, Prev: Race Conditions with -exec, Up: Security Considerations for find

11.2.4 Race Conditions with '-print' and '-print0'
--------------------------------------------------

The '-print' and '-print0' actions can be used to produce a list of
files matching some criteria, which can then be used with some other
command, perhaps with 'xargs'. Unfortunately, this means that there is
an unavoidable time gap between 'find' deciding that one or more files
meet its criteria and the relevant command being executed. For this
reason, the '-print' and '-print0' actions are just as insecure as
'-exec'.

In fact, since the construction

find ... -print | xargs ...

does not cope correctly with newlines or other "white space" in file
names, and copes poorly with file names containing quotes, the '-print'
action is less secure even than '-print0'.

File: find.info, Node: Security Considerations for xargs, Next: Security Considerations for locate, Prev: Security Considerations for find, Up: Security Considerations

11.3 Security Considerations for 'xargs'
========================================

The description of the race conditions affecting the '-print' action of
'find' shows that 'xargs' cannot be secure if it is possible for an
attacker to modify a filesystem after 'find' has started but before
'xargs' has completed all its actions.

However, there are other security issues that exist even if it is not
possible for an attacker to have access to the filesystem in real time.
Firstly, if it is possible for an attacker to create files with names of
their choice on the filesystem, then 'xargs' is insecure unless the '-0'
option is used. If a file with the name
'/home/someuser/foo/bar\n/etc/passwd' exists (assume that '\n' stands
for a newline character), then 'find ... -print' can be persuaded to
print three separate lines:

/home/someuser/foo/bar

/etc/passwd

If it finds a blank line in the input, 'xargs' will ignore it.
Therefore, if some action is to be taken on the basis of this list of
files, the '/etc/passwd' file would be included even if this was not the
intent of the person running find. There are circumstances in which an
attacker can use this to their advantage. The same consideration
applies to file names containing ordinary spaces rather than newlines,
except that of course the list of file names will no longer contain an
"extra" newline.

This problem is an unavoidable consequence of the default behaviour
of the 'xargs' command, which is specified by the POSIX standard. The
only ways to avoid this problem are either to avoid all use of 'xargs'
in favour for example of 'find -exec' or (where available) 'find
-execdir', or to use the '-0' option, which ensures that 'xargs'
considers file names to be separated by ASCII NUL characters rather than
whitespace. However, useful as this option is, the POSIX standard does
not make it mandatory.

POSIX also specifies that 'xargs' interprets quoting and trailing
whitespace specially in filenames, too. This means that using 'find ...
-print | xargs ...' can cause the commands run by 'xargs' to receive a
list of file names which is not the same as the list printed by 'find'.
The interpretation of quotes and trailing whitespace is turned off by
the '-0' argument to 'xargs', which is another reason to use that
option.

File: find.info, Node: Security Considerations for locate, Next: Security Summary, Prev: Security Considerations for xargs, Up: Security Considerations

11.4 Security Considerations for 'locate'
=========================================

11.4.1 Race Conditions
----------------------

It is fairly unusual for the output of 'locate' to be fed into another
command. However, if this were to be done, this would raise the same
set of security issues as the use of 'find ... -print'. Although the
problems relating to whitespace in file names can be resolved by using
'locate''s '-0' option, this still leaves the race condition problems
associated with 'find ... -print0'. There is no way to avoid these
problems in the case of 'locate'.

11.4.2 Long File Name Bugs with Old-Format Databases
----------------------------------------------------

Old versions of 'locate' have a bug in the way that old-format databases
are read. This bug affects the following versions of 'locate':

1. All releases prior to 4.2.31
2. All 4.3.x releases prior to 4.3.7

The affected versions of 'locate' read file names into a fixed-length
1026 byte buffer, allocated on the heap. This buffer is not extended if
file names are too long to fit into the buffer. No range checking on
the length of the filename is performed. This could in theory lead to a
privilege escalation attack. Findutils versions 4.3.0 to 4.3.6 are also
affected.

On systems using the old database format and affected versions of
'locate', carefully-chosen long file names could in theory allow
malicious users to run code of their choice as any user invoking locate.

If remote users can choose the names of files stored on your system,
and these files are indexed by 'updatedb', this may be a remote security
vulnerability. Findutils version 4.2.31 and findutils version 4.3.7
include fixes for this problem. The 'updatedb', 'bigram' and 'code'
programs do no appear to be affected.

If you are also using GNU coreutils, you can use the following
command to determine the length of the longest file name on a given
system:

find / -print0 | tr -c '\0' 'x' | tr '\0' '\n' | wc -L

Although this problem is significant, the old database format is not
the default, and use of the old database format is not common. Most
installations and most users will not be affected by this problem.

File: find.info, Node: Security Summary, Next: Further Reading on Security, Prev: Security Considerations for locate, Up: Security Considerations

11.5 Summary
============

Where untrusted parties can create files on the system, or affect the
names of files that are created, all uses for 'find', 'locate' and
'xargs' have known security problems except the following:

Informational use only
Uses where the programs are used to prepare lists of file names
upon which no further action will ever be taken.

'-delete'
Use of the '-delete' action with 'find' to delete files which meet
specified criteria

'-execdir'
Use of the '-execdir' action with 'find' where the 'PATH'
environment variable contains directories which contain only
trusted programs.

File: find.info, Node: Further Reading on Security, Prev: Security Summary, Up: Security Considerations

11.6 Further Reading on Security
================================

While there are a number of books on computer security, there are also
useful articles on the web that touch on the issues described above:

<http://goo.gl/DAvh>
This article describes some of the unfortunate effects of allowing
free choice of file names.
<http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/78.html>
Describes OS Command Injection
<https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/73.html>
Describes problems arising from allowing remote computers to send
requests which specify file names of their choice
<http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/116.html>
Describes problems relating to encoding file names and escaping
characters. This article is relevant to findutils because for
command lines processed via the shell, the encoding and escaping
rules are already set by the shell. For example command lines like
'find ... -print | some-shell-script' require specific care.
<http://xkcd.com/327/>
A humorous and pithy summary of the broader problem.

File: find.info, Node: Error Messages, Next: GNU Free Documentation License, Prev: Security Considerations, Up: Top

12 Error Messages
*****************

This section describes some of the error messages sometimes made by
'find', 'xargs', or 'locate', explains them and in some cases provides
advice as to what you should do about this.

This manual is written in English. The GNU findutils software
features translations of error messages for many languages. For this
reason the error messages produced by the programs are made to be as
self-explanatory as possible. This approach avoids leaving people to
figure out which test an English-language error message corresponds to.
Error messages which are self-explanatory will not normally be mentioned
in this document. For those messages mentioned in this document, only
the English-language version of the message will be listed.

* Menu:

* Error Messages From find::
* Error Messages From xargs::
* Error Messages From locate::
* Error Messages From updatedb::

File: find.info, Node: Error Messages From find, Next: Error Messages From xargs, Up: Error Messages

12.1 Error Messages From 'find'
===============================

Most error messages produced by find are self-explanatory. Error
messages sometimes include a filename. When this happens, the filename
is quoted in order to prevent any unusual characters in the filename
making unwanted changes in the state of the terminal.

'invalid predicate `-foo''
This means that the 'find' command line included something that
started with a dash or other special character. The 'find' program
tried to interpret this as a test, action or option, but didn't
recognise it. If it was intended to be a test, check what was
specified against the documentation. If, on the other hand, the
string is the name of a file which has been expanded from a
wildcard (for example because you have a '*' on the command line),
consider using './*' or just '.' instead.

'unexpected extra predicate'
This usually happens if you have an extra bracket on the command
line (for example 'find . -print \)').

'Warning: filesystem /path/foo has recently been mounted'
'Warning: filesystem /path/foo has recently been unmounted'
These messages might appear when 'find' moves into a directory and
finds that the device number and inode are different from what it
expected them to be. If the directory 'find' has moved into is on
a network filesystem (NFS), it will not issue this message, because
'automount' frequently mounts new filesystems on directories as you
move into them (that is how it knows you want to use the
filesystem). So, if you do see this message, be wary - 'automount'
may not have been responsible. Consider the possibility that
someone else is manipulating the filesystem while 'find' is
running. Some people might do this in order to mislead 'find' or
persuade it to look at one set of files when it thought it was
looking at another set.

'/path/foo changed during execution of find (old device number 12345, new device number 6789, filesystem type is <whatever>) [ref XXX]'
This message is issued when 'find' moves into a directory and ends
up somewhere it didn't expect to be. This happens in one of two
circumstances. Firstly, this happens when 'automount' intervenes
on a system where 'find' doesn't know how to determine what the
current set of mounted filesystems is.

Secondly, this can happen when the device number of a directory
appears to change during a change of current directory, but 'find'
is moving up the filesystem hierarchy rather than down into it. In
order to prevent 'find' wandering off into some unexpected part of
the filesystem, we stop it at this point.

'Don't know how to use getmntent() to read `/etc/mtab'. This is a bug.'
This message is issued when a problem similar to the above occurs
on a system where 'find' doesn't know how to figure out the current
list of mount points. Ask for help on <bug-findutils@gnu.org>.

'/path/foo/bar changed during execution of find (old inode number 12345, new inode number 67893, filesystem type is <whatever>) [ref XXX]"),'
This message is issued when 'find' moves into a directory and
discovers that the inode number of that directory is different from
the inode number that it obtained when it examined the directory
previously. This usually means that while 'find' was deep in a
directory hierarchy doing a time consuming operation, somebody has
moved one of the parent directories to another location in the same
filesystem. This may or may not have been done maliciously. In
any case, 'find' stops at this point to avoid traversing parts of
the filesystem that it wasn't intended to. You can use 'ls -li' or
'find /path -inum 12345 -o -inum 67893' to find out more about what
has happened.

'sanity check of the fnmatch() library function failed.'
Please submit a bug report. You may well be asked questions about
your system, and if you compiled the 'findutils' code yourself, you
should keep your copy of the build tree around. The likely
explanation is that your system has a buggy implementation of
'fnmatch' that looks enough like the GNU version to fool
'configure', but which doesn't work properly.

'cannot fork'
This normally happens if you use the '-exec' action or something
similar ('-ok' and so forth) but the system has run out of free
process slots. This is either because the system is very busy and
the system has reached its maximum process limit, or because you
have a resource limit in place and you've reached it. Check the
system for runaway processes (with 'ps', if possible). Some
process slots are normally reserved for use by 'root'.

'some-program terminated by signal 99'
Some program which was launched with '-exec' or similar was killed
with a fatal signal. This is just an advisory message.

File: find.info, Node: Error Messages From xargs, Next: Error Messages From locate, Prev: Error Messages From find, Up: Error Messages

12.2 Error Messages From 'xargs'
================================

'environment is too large for exec'
This message means that you have so many environment variables set
(or such large values for them) that there is no room within the
system-imposed limits on program command line argument length to
invoke any program. This is an unlikely situation and is more
likely result of an attempt to test the limits of 'xargs', or break
it. Please try unsetting some environment variables, or exiting
the current shell. You can also use 'xargs --show-limits' to
understand the relevant sizes.

'argument list too long'
You are using the '-I' option and 'xargs' doesn't have enough space
to build a command line because it has read a really large item and
it doesn't fit. You may be able to work around this problem with
the '-s' option, but the default size is pretty large. This is a
rare situation and is more likely an attempt to test the limits of
'xargs', or break it. Otherwise, you will need to try to shorten
the problematic argument or not use 'xargs'.

'argument line too long'
You are using the '-L' or '-l' option and one of the input lines is
too long. You may be able to work around this problem with the
'-s' option, but the default size is pretty large. If you can
modify the your 'xargs' command not to use '-L' or '-l', that will
be more likely to result in success.

'cannot fork'
See the description of the similar message for 'find'.

'<program>: exited with status 255; aborting'
When a command run by 'xargs' exits with status 255, 'xargs' is
supposed to stop. If this is not what you intended, wrap the
program you are trying to invoke in a shell script which doesn't
return status 255.

'<program>: terminated by signal 99'
See the description of the similar message for 'find'.

'cannot set SIGUSR1 signal handler'
'xargs' is having trouble preparing for you to be able to send it
signals to increase or decrease the parallelism of its processing.
If you don't plan to send it those signals, this warning can be
ignored (though if you're a programmer, you may want to help us
figure out why 'xargs' is confused by your operating system).

File: find.info, Node: Error Messages From locate, Next: Error Messages From updatedb, Prev: Error Messages From xargs, Up: Error Messages

12.3 Error Messages From 'locate'
=================================

'warning: database '/usr/local/var/locatedb' is more than 8 days old'
The 'locate' program relies on a database which is periodically
built by the 'updatedb' program. That hasn't happened in a long
time. To fix this problem, run 'updatedb' manually. This can
often happen on systems that are generally not left on, so the
periodic "cron" task which normally does this doesn't get a chance
to run.

'locate database '/usr/local/var/locatedb' is corrupt or invalid'
This should not happen. Re-run 'updatedb'. If that works, but
'locate' still produces this error, run 'locate --version' and
'updatedb --version'. These should produce the same output. If
not, you are using a mixed toolset; check your '$PATH' environment
variable and your shell aliases (if you have any). If both
programs claim to be GNU versions, this is a bug; all versions of
these programs should interoperate without problem. Ask for help
on <bug-findutils@gnu.org>.

File: find.info, Node: Error Messages From updatedb, Prev: Error Messages From locate, Up: Error Messages

12.4 Error Messages From 'updatedb'
===================================

The 'updatedb' program (and the programs it invokes) do issue error
messages, but none seem to be candidates for guidance. If you are
having a problem understanding one of these, ask for help on
<bug-findutils@gnu.org>.

File: find.info, Node: GNU Free Documentation License, Next: Primary Index, Prev: Error Messages, Up: Top

Appendix A GNU Free Documentation License
*****************************************

Version 1.3, 3 November 2008

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

0. PREAMBLE

The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other
functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to
assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it,
with or without modifying it, either commercially or
noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the
author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not
being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative
works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense.
It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft
license designed for free software.

We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for
free software, because free software needs free documentation: a
free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms
that the software does. But this License is not limited to
software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless
of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We
recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is
instruction or reference.

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This License applies to any manual or other work, in any medium,
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A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the
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A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section
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The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Sections whose
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an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the
previous sentence.

J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document
for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and
likewise the network locations given in the Document for
previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in the
"History" section. You may omit a network location for a work
that was published at least four years before the Document
itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers
to gives permission.

K. For any section Entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications",
Preserve the Title of the section, and preserve in the section
all the substance and tone of each of the contributor
acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.

L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered
in their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the
equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.

M. Delete any section Entitled "Endorsements". Such a section
may not be included in the Modified Version.

N. Do not retitle any existing section to be Entitled
"Endorsements" or to conflict in title with any Invariant
Section.

O. Preserve any Warranty Disclaimers.

If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or
appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no
material copied from the Document, you may at your option designate
some or all of these sections as invariant. To do this, add their
titles to the list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version's
license notice. These titles must be distinct from any other
section titles.

You may add a section Entitled "Endorsements", provided it contains
nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by various
parties--for example, statements of peer review or that the text
has been approved by an organization as the authoritative
definition of a standard.

You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text,
and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of
the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one passage
of Front-Cover Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or
through arrangements made by) any one entity. If the Document
already includes a cover text for the same cover, previously added
by you or by arrangement made by the same entity you are acting on
behalf of, you may not add another; but you may replace the old
one, on explicit permission from the previous publisher that added
the old one.

The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this
License give permission to use their names for publicity for or to
assert or imply endorsement of any Modified Version.

5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS

You may combine the Document with other documents released under
this License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for
modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all
of the Invariant Sections of all of the original documents,
unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your
combined work in its license notice, and that you preserve all
their Warranty Disclaimers.

The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and
multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single
copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name
but different contents, make the title of each such section unique
by adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the
original author or publisher of that section if known, or else a
unique number. Make the same adjustment to the section titles in
the list of Invariant Sections in the license notice of the
combined work.

In the combination, you must combine any sections Entitled
"History" in the various original documents, forming one section
Entitled "History"; likewise combine any sections Entitled
"Acknowledgements", and any sections Entitled "Dedications". You
must delete all sections Entitled "Endorsements."

6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS

You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other
documents released under this License, and replace the individual
copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy
that is included in the collection, provided that you follow the
rules of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents
in all other respects.

You may extract a single document from such a collection, and
distribute it individually under this License, provided you insert
a copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this
License in all other respects regarding verbatim copying of that
document.

7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS

A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other
separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a
storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the
copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the
legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual
works permit. When the Document is included in an aggregate, this
License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which
are not themselves derivative works of the Document.

If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these
copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one half
of the entire aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed
on covers that bracket the Document within the aggregate, or the
electronic equivalent of covers if the Document is in electronic
form. Otherwise they must appear on printed covers that bracket
the whole aggregate.

8. TRANSLATION

Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may
distribute translations of the Document under the terms of section
4. Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special
permission from their copyright holders, but you may include
translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the
original versions of these Invariant Sections. You may include a
translation of this License, and all the license notices in the
Document, and any Warranty Disclaimers, provided that you also
include the original English version of this License and the
original versions of those notices and disclaimers. In case of a
disagreement between the translation and the original version of
this License or a notice or disclaimer, the original version will
prevail.

If a section in the Document is Entitled "Acknowledgements",
"Dedications", or "History", the requirement (section 4) to
Preserve its Title (section 1) will typically require changing the
actual title.

9. TERMINATION

You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document
except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt
otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute it is void,
and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.

However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your
license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a)
provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and
finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the
copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some
reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.

Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is
reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the
violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have
received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from
that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days
after your receipt of the notice.

Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate
the licenses of parties who have received copies or rights from you
under this License. If your rights have been terminated and not
permanently reinstated, receipt of a copy of some or all of the
same material does not give you any rights to use it.

10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE

The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of
the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new
versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may
differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. See
<http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/>.

Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version
number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered
version of this License "or any later version" applies to it, you
have the option of following the terms and conditions either of
that specified version or of any later version that has been
published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the
Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may
choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free
Software Foundation. If the Document specifies that a proxy can
decide which future versions of this License can be used, that
proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version permanently
authorizes you to choose that version for the Document.

11. RELICENSING

"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any
World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also
provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A
public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server.
A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the
site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC
site.

"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit
corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco,
California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license
published by that same organization.

"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or
in part, as part of another Document.

An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this
License, and if all works that were first published under this
License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently
incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover
texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior
to November 1, 2008.

The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the
site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1,
2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.

ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents
====================================================

To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of
the License in the document and put the following copyright and license
notices just after the title page:

Copyright (C) YEAR YOUR NAME.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled ``GNU
Free Documentation License''.

If you have Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts and Back-Cover
Texts, replace the "with...Texts." line with this:

with the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES, with
the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts
being LIST.

If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other
combination of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the
situation.

If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we
recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free
software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit
their use in free software.