Imagine that you have just written a post on your blog, tweeted about it and watched it get retweeted by some popular Twitter users, sending hundreds of people to your blog at once. Your excitement at seeing so many visitors talk about your post turns to dismay as they start to tweet that your website is down — a database connection error is shown.

The Linux find command is a very useful and handy command to search for files from the command line. It can be used to search for files based on various criterias like permissions, user ownership, modification date/time, size etc. In this post we shall learn to use the find command along with various options that it supports.

The examples are broken down into discrete examples making it easy to learn and comprehend. The find command is available on most linux distros by default so you do not have to install any package. This is a command you must master, if you want to get comfortable with your linux system.

So lets begin with the command.

The basic format of the syntax is like this