Terminal commands - find

Find by file name

To perform a find command in terminal use

find / -name php.ini -type f

find / -name {filename} {type parameters}

Note there are many parameters in the commands, so I'll cover a couple regular expressions here.  Such as, 

If you want to perform a file all files that end in .php

find / -name '*.php'

Find files with the word "laravel" in the name.

find / -name '*laravel*'

Regex match, more flexible. Find both .php files and files with the word "laravel" in the name.

find / -regex '.*laravel.*\|.*\.php'

Note, with regex you can also make the search insensitive through using -iregex

find / -iregex '.*laravel.*\|.*\.php'

A great resource list is on ss64

Find text in a file

grep -iRl "text-to-find" ./

grep {switches} "text" {directory}

What do the switches do...

./ - the last parameter is the path to the folder containing files you need to search for your text.  Working from root directory, you will scan your entire server.  If that is a little too heavy, you can change it to the full path of the folder such as /var/www/vhosts/

Expressions

There are, however, other expressions you can use:

Examples of the find command in action

To find all the files within your home folder accessed more than 80 days ago:

find ~ -atime 80

To find all the empty files and folders in your system:

find / -empty

To find all the executable files on your computer:

find / -executable

To find all the files that are readable:

find / -readable

Find by date

find . -maxdepth 1 -newermt "2021-06-09"

Find by time - recent period

To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in a particular specific directory and its sub-directories:

find / -mtime -1 -ls

Alter the slash '/' to restrict the query to the directories you want to target

To query the last three hours use

find / -mmin -180 -ls

Combining with an earlier query you can use

find / -name php.ini -type f -mmin -180 -ls