1 Introduction

This manual shows how to find files that meet criteria you specify, and how to perform various actions on the files that you find. The principal programs that you use to perform these tasks are find, locate, and xargs. Some of the examples in this manual use capabilities specific to the GNU versions of those programs.

GNU find was originally written by Eric Decker, with enhancements by David MacKenzie, Jay Plett, and Tim Wood. GNU xargs was originally written by Mike Rendell, with enhancements by David MacKenzie. GNU locate and its associated utilities were originally written by James Woods, with enhancements by David MacKenzie. The idea for ‘find -print0’ and ‘xargs -0’ came from Dan Bernstein. The current maintainer of GNU findutils (and this manual) is James Youngman. Many other people have contributed bug fixes, small improvements, and helpful suggestions. Thanks!

To report a bug in GNU findutils, please use the form on the Savannah web site at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils. Reporting bugs this way means that you will then be able to track progress in fixing the problem.

If you don’t have web access, you can also just send mail to the mailing list. The mailing list bug-findutils@gnu.org carries discussion of bugs in findutils, questions and answers about the software and discussion of the development of the programs. To join the list, send email to bug-findutils-request@gnu.org.

Please read any relevant sections of this manual before asking for help on the mailing list. You may also find it helpful to read the NON-BUGS section of the find manual page.

If you ask for help on the mailing list, people will be able to help you much more effectively if you include the following things:

• The version of the software you are running. You can find this out by running ‘locate --version’.
• What you were trying to do
• The exact command line you used
• The exact output you got (if this is very long, try to find a smaller example which exhibits the same problem)
• The output you expected to get

It may also be the case that the bug you are describing has already been fixed, if it is a bug. Please check the most recent findutils releases at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/findutils and, if possible, the development branch at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/findutils. If you take the time to check that your bug still exists in current releases, this will greatly help people who want to help you solve your problem. Please also be aware that if you obtained findutils as part of the GNU/Linux ’distribution’, the distributions often lag seriously behind findutils releases, even the stable release. Please check the GNU FTP site.