Simple command “find” not working

find

so I'm in the main folder for my web hosts, trying to find a file using find. I couldn't find it – it was listed as no such file or directory – and I thought maybe it isn't anywhere.

However the following command doesn't work either:

find index.php

which is wrong cause there are a gazillion of them. Why is find not working? Is there a better command to use?

Best Answer

The syntax of find is not like what you have written, please read the manual page man find to get detailed idea.

For example if you want to find files named index.php on the current directory and all the sub directories under it, you can use:

find . -name index.php -type f

If you want to search for files having names say findex.php, index.phpfoo, index.php you need to use:

find . -name '*index.php*' -type f

* is a glob pattern meaning zero or more characters.

On the other hand if you want to look in the current directory only :

find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*index.php*' -type f

Related Solutions

Bash – find command with -execdir not reading flags

The command you claim to be executing doesn't match the error message you're getting, but either way this answer should clarify some things.

First, note that if there are any files matching *jpg in the current directory, the pattern *jpg will be expanded on the command line of find. You need to quote the pattern to protect from that.

With the command you've given, what gets executed is something like

cd directory && mv -f file

But mv expects two arguments: a source file and a destination.

You need to pass a target directory, and since you're using -execdir, the target directory will be interpreted relative to each directory where there are .jpg files. Note that the directory must exist. If you want to move all .jpg files to a single directory, create it first, then run

find -iname '*.jpg' -execdir mv -f {} /common-destination-directory

If you want to move all files to a relative path, for example move them to the images subdirectory relative to where they are, you will need to create the directory first.

find -iname '*.jpg' -execdir mkdir -p images \; -execdir mv -f {} images \;

With GNU utilities (i.e. on Linux) you can optimize a little by running mv only once per directory:

find -iname '*.jpg' -execdir mkdir -p images \; -execdir mv -t images {} +

“find: .: No such file or directory” while using find on the current directory

According to your strace output, and I have no idea about the reason, the open() function prefix filenames with /proc/ :

open(".", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = 4
fcntl64(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
getdents64(4, /* 21 entries */, 32768) = 664
getgid32() = 0
stat64("/proc/index.php", 0xbfc53bd0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
getgid32() = 0
stat64("/proc/.svn", 0xbfc53bd0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
getgid32() = 0
stat64("/proc/init-dist.php", 0xbfc53bd0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
getgid32() = 0
stat64("/proc/landing-page.html", 0xbfc53bd0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
getgid32() = 0
[...]
stat64("/proc/js", 0xbfc53bd0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
getgid32() = 0
stat64("/proc/extras", 0xbfc53bd0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
getgid32() = 0
stat64("/proc/sitemaps", 0xbfc53bd0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
getdents64(4, /* 0 entries */, 32768) = 0

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – find command with -execdir not reading flags

“find: .: No such file or directory” while using find on the current directory

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