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Comment by ww520

4 years ago 

  - Find all files modified in the last 90 minutes  
    find . -type f -mmin -90  
  - Find all files and do something to each one
    find . -type f -mmin -90 | xargs ls -l  
  - Find all files modified before 2 days ago  
    find . -type f -mtime +2  
  - Removing files older than 7 days  
    find . -type f -mtime +7 -name '*.gz' -exec rm {} \;  
  - Find all files modified after last 2 days  
    find . -type f -mtime -2  
  - Find all files modified at the last 2 day mark  
    find . -type f -mtime 2

13 comments

ww520

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pmoriarty  4 years ago

With zsh you don't need to use find, fd, or any other external tool.

zsh's built-in globbing features can be used instead.

  - Find all files modified in the last 90 minutes
    print -l **/*(mm-90)
  - Find all files and do something to each one
    print -l **/*(mm-90) | xargs ls -l
  - Find all files modified before 2 days ago
    print -l **/*(m+2)
  - Removing files older than 7 days
    zargs -- **/*(m+7) -- rm
  - Find all files modified after last 2 days
    print -l **/*(m-2)
  - Find all files modified at the last 2 day mark
    print -l **/*(m2)

In most of the above examples "print -l" is used to print the results to the terminal, but you can instead use whatever command you want (as in the "rm" example above).

Many more examples and tips can be seen here: [1]

[1] - http://www.zzapper.co.uk/zshtips.html

  • ptspts  4 years ago

    The zsh rm command doesn't with too many (say, 100 000) files, execve() fails with: Argument list too long. This works and it is relatively fast (runs rm in big batches): find ... | xargs -d '\n' rm --

    • tyingq  4 years ago

      Perl is also helpful to pipe to for any tool that outputs lists of files, like

        find . -type f -name '*foo' | perl -ne 'print;chomp;unlink'

      And it has the same -0 switch as xargs to pair with find's -print0.

      Not helpful in this case since you have other options, but maybe helpful for things like bulk touch, chmod, etc.

    • blaerk  4 years ago

      For you can skip xargs for that and just add the -delete argument to find, for readability and profit(!?)

pabs3  4 years ago

Please use `find -print0 | xargs -0` (or -exec) when running commands on files, otherwise xargs will mangle filenames in some cases.

ahoef  4 years ago

Depending on how you name your files, you want to add -print0 to your find and -o to your xargs. If you have spaces in your file names you want that to carry over in your xargs.

Secondly, you may want to add -n 200 to your xargs so if you have very, very many files bash doesn't complain.

So:

Find all files and do something to each one

    find . -type f -mmin -90 -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1024 ls -l

goodevans  4 years ago

Find all .txt files containing the word 'foo': find ./ -mount -type f -name "*.txt" -exec grep -iHn 'foo' {} \;

(the -mount stops it traversing into mounted shares)

  • pmoriarty  4 years ago

    With zsh:

      grep -iHn 'foo' **/*.txt(.)

    Though I'm not sure how to prevent zsh from descending in to other filesystems, as you can with find.