find — Filesystem Search & Execution

Filesystem search and execution with find across 13 disciplines. Each discipline is a directory — add sub-pages as it grows without restructuring. All commands copy-paste-runnable on Arch Linux.

Disciplines

Discipline Description Partials

Basics

Name matching, type predicates, extensions, depth control, negation

1

Time & Size

mtime/mmin predicates, newer-than, size ranges, empty files/dirs

1

Permissions

Exact/at-least permissions, SUID/SGID, ownership, world-writable

1

Execution

-exec with \; and +, sh -c patterns, prune, xargs handoff, -delete

1

Logic

Implicit AND, explicit OR, NOT, combined predicates, depth control

1

Infrastructure

Antora auditing, certificate discovery, log rotation, pacman cache

1

Gotchas

Glob expansion, implicit -print, symlinks, operator precedence, -prune

1

Cleanup

Safe deletion, dry-run patterns, empty files/dirs, cache, broken symlinks

1

Archiving

Backup with tar/cpio/rsync, date ranges, manifests, compress-and-remove

1

Monitoring

Change detection with -mmin, -newer, snapshots, permission diffs, git index

1

Pipelines

Multi-tool chains — xargs + awk, parallel, process substitution, tee, loops

1

Security

SUID/SGID, world-writable, orphaned files, .ssh, capabilities, /etc audit

1

Antora Auditing

Missing descriptions, orphaned partials, nav gaps, duplicates, page sizes

1

See Also

  • xargs — act on find output

  • awk — process find output

  • grep — pattern matching (find locates, grep searches content)