An intermediate look at the find utility

When you want to find files that have been accessed, you use the -amin option.

So, to find files in the current directory that were accessed exactly 10 minutes ago, you could use:

To find files that were accessed within the last few minutes, precede the number of minutes with a -. To find files accessed within the last 30 minutes, run:

If you want to find all files than have been modified you would use -mmin and to find files who's metadata or status has changed, you'd use -cmin. Hence, to search for config files in /etc who's contents has been modified over the last 30 minutes, use the command:

Find files Accessed/Changed/Modified within the last few days

To find files accessed/changed/modified in the last 24 hours, use -atime, -ctime, and -mtime respectively.

So to find any files on your system that have been accessed in the last 24 hours, you could use:

The number of 24 hour periods actually gets rounded off so that fractions of a day are ignored.
This means that to find files accessed in the last 0 to 24 hours, use -atime 0 as above, and to find files accessed in the last 24 to 48 hours, use -atime 1, and so on.

This can be used in conjunction with + which basically means older than (in this case). So to find files that were accessed at least 3 days ago, you could use:

that is older than the 24 hour period between 48 --> 72 hours ago, or in other words, to be part of the results, the files must have been accessed more than 2 days ago (at least 3 days).

Note that for the -amin, -cmin, -mmin, -atime, -ctime, and -mtime options, you can specify to measure times from the beginning of the day rather than the last 24 hours by using the -daystart option; for example;

will show all files in /var/log modified since the beginning of today rather than in the last 24 hours.

Find files based on owner and/or group

If you need to find files belonging to a particular owner use the -user option as shown below for the user tutonics:

If file.txt exists on on the system, but is owned by another user, it will not be returned in the results.

You can also search for files in a particular group by using the -group option, for example to search for all .log files in group adm, you could use:

If you need to check for both a specific owner and group, just use both as in:

To check for files with no known user or group, use the options -nouser and -nogroup respectively.

If a user account gets removed from your desktop or server it is always a good idea to find files that have no user or group and give them a user/group or even remove them from your system.

To identify files on your system that have no user:

To find files that have no user and no group use:

Mounted file systems

If you don't want find to descend directories of other file systems that you've mounted, use the -mount option or the equivalent -xdev option; for example:

or