The History of the Design of Unix’s Find Command (1995)

find was actually introduced several years before the bourne shell, so that's a bit unfair. I assume that the syntax was less awkward when it was first released.

Not that I don't agree that it's a pain to use nowadays.

I have written many cross-platform shell scripts over the years. The -print option may have been made standard by the GNU implementation and then spread -- I don't know -- but at least on some older versions of UNIX you do indeed need to specify -print or it won't.

The -print option was not the default when I first used find (in v6 Unix, back in PDP-11 days). I don't recall what 4.2bsd did, which was the next version of Unix that I used.

I thought it was pretty brain-damaged, and that whoever decided that had decided poorly.

The author of the tool should have pushed back, IMHO. Then again, I don't know the political structure of the shop where find(1) was written, so maybe that was impossible.

I've spent the morning trying to find the answer, and I don't have one. But I figured I'd share what I did gather.

    [N] 1982 4.1BSD
    [?] 1992 POSIX.2 (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992)
    [Y] 1993 FreeBSD 1.0 (though it wasn't mentioned in the man page)
    [Y] 1994 GNU find 4.0
    [?] 2001 POSIX.1-2001 (IEEE Std 1003.1-2001)
    [Y] 2004 POSIX.1-2004 (IEEE Std 1003.1-2004)

Edit: Nevermind, I have an answer:

In on 1990-04-17, Keith Bostic made a commit with the message "new version derived from Cimarron Taylor's", which introduced it to BSD between 4.3-Tahoe and 4.3-Reno.

Shortly after, on 1990-06-03, David MacKenzie added an entry to the ChangeLog that added it to GNU find 1.2.

I hope this doesn't come across as a "RTFM" comment, because I don't intend it to be, but I have found it helpful to get into the habit of reading man files when I need to know how to use a command. The quality of the man files on your system might not be the best, so I would suggest bookmarking the man pages from the OpenBSD project[1]. It might not always be directly applicable to your system, since some commands are different between linux, osx, and *bsd, but no matter what platform you are on, the OpenBSD man pages are very high quality, and at the very least might point you in the right direction.

1: http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/OpenBSD/

On any reasonable unix, you should be able to simply type `man cmd` where `cmd` is the command you're looking to learn more about. You can try this with `man man` for instance.

Learning how to operate a shell isn't very difficult, but to really become proficient takes some time. It's also important to make a difference between the shell and the operating system it runs on. Some utilities for instance, may have the same name but slightly different flags or modes of operation, which can throw you off. You'll learn these things along the way, and mostly it doesn't matter unless you find yourself having to deal with many different unix systems (such as developing general purpose shell scripts.)

I'd certainly argue it's worth learning how to use a shell, if you find yourself having to drop in to one relatively often, or if you're just somewhat interested. There are plenty of resources online, but I'm partial to tldp's guides[1].

I couldn't say much about PowerShell, I know next to nothing about it. I also have the benefit of not having to touch Windows systems much, and when I do I usually drop into git bash or something similar anyway. I'd say the answer to that question might lie in what systems you usually work in, and which ones you want to work in. If you have little interest in unix based systems, then by all means go forth and Windows up, but otherwise I'd suggest learning more about unix shells and specifically: bash. Why bash? It may be the javascript of unix shells – there are certainly more (and less) capable shells out there – but it has the benefit of ubiquity. You can find bash pretty much anywhere. (And with git bash and the likes, even on Windows!)

[1]: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html

One major thing is that there is so much inconsistency.

Several posters here have commented on how find is a terrible tool with weird syntax. It's not actually terrible or weird, it's just different... because it pre-dates most everything else.

And it is hard to know how to ask the computer how to use the tools. Is the flag you need in `cmd -h` (traditional) or `cmd -help` (X11) or `cmd --help` (GNU) or `cmd --usage` (other GNU) or `man cmd` (UNIX; `man` is short for "manual") or `info cmd` (GNU)?

mstade said that "On any reasonable unix" the solution is `man cmd`. That's in general true, but apparently GNU/Linux isn't a reasonable unix then[1] (one may even say that it's not Unix :P ). Often (mostly for GNU commands), the man page is crappy (don't ever bother with the wget man page, `wget --help` is what you want) or non-existent. But it's a good place to start, then you can try working through the options I listed above... after some point you'll gain some intuition for which are the more likely ones to yield results based on who the publisher of the software is.

untothebreach's suggestion to bookmark the man pages for a system that has consistently good man pages, even if they aren't 100% compatible with the version of the command you have. He recommended OpenBSD, which is a good choice. When I was new, I leaned pretty heavily on the FreeBSD man pages https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi .

[1]: Plug: I actually wrote a blog post once on why documentation on GNU/Linux sucks. https://lukeshu.com/blog/poor-system-documentation.html

> Also would anyone recommend learning how to use Windows PowerShell and again would that have the same kind of insane learning curve?

I do have to use Powershell at work so I am familiar with it. But you can't seriously claim that Powershell is an example of good design. Its language is as inconsistent as Bash, even with the benefit of hindsight.

Powershell is only helpful with the flags and switches, if you are calling other powershell scripts, or .net libraries. If you are calling standard executables, you are back to square one. Which happens to be bash's more common use case.

It does take some time to be comfortable at any shell. That applies to WIMP ones too, but you've probably gone trough that phase already.

That said, you should get able to do the basics fast, and need time just to expand to the less common corners. Also, practice will make you comfortable, and indeed faster, but is not a requisite for using it correctly. The learning curve is steep, but there's no barrier anywhere, and no leap in understanding (if you already can code).

As people will keep telling you, the manual is your friend.

Check out this book: The Linux Command Line.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781593273897.do

There's a review of it by me on that page, under the Reviews link. I think that review (which I spent some time and effort writing) will give you a fairly good overview of the topics you (or anyone) needs to learn to become good at using Linux (or other Unixes) at a user level.

There are also tons of other resources for it on the net, including many at http://tldp.org - The Linux Documentation Project. Some of those may feel more advanced, so you may want to start with the book above, or any other similar book, and then move on to the TLDP and other tutorials on the net.

These days I often feel that Google + Stack Overflow are the real textual UI to a computer, and the command line is a kind of bytecode.

As with any assembler, you can get pretty good at memorizing the commonly used parts, but often you'll just need to look it up.

Would it be possible to make a compiler for this: a "natural language Google search query to bash script" tool to automate the process that everybody does anyway...?

Nah. You can get comfortable with the Unix shell in a week.

First thing's first: you have to know what's out there in order to find out how to use it. Go to a book store (they still have those right?) and pick up a 50 page Unix command line reference. Read it cover to cover. Play with each individual command in some way.

Note: this should be a UNIX reference, and not Linux. You want something ancient and decrepit, because it'll be the most universal and simple set of commands to start with.

Get another book, something like an Introduction to Linux System Administration. Besides telling you all about the system itself, this will task you with running commands and modifying different parts of the system; you'll be doing lots of command-line work, all following the book's instructions.

Finally, attempt to write basic shell scripts and run commands with a basic user interface, like lynx or mc. This will not only teach you how the shell interprets everything you type into it, it will give you an insight into the other ways the console works with the terminal, applications, i/o, etc.

It may sound like a lot for a week, but if you spend a couple hours a night on these you can't go wrong. When in doubt, buy another book.

Many thousands of people learned it before you so it can't be that hard, and you have it way easier than most of them since you have all the world's information at your Googletips. Like everything, you poke around trying different things until something works and then you do it again. The key is to not be afraid of the damn thing or blame yourself for being too stupid. Everything is stupid we just all muddle through the best we can.

No, probably more on the scale of months. In my case it was years, but I was an intermittent and resentful user.

I'd say ignore the people who recommend man pages; they're pretty much the worst form of documentation out there. The first thing they show you is a cartesian product of all switches, which can do nothing but serve to confuse you. After that, they list the switches an alphabetical order, which is useful only as a reference after you already understand the command.

It's true, you can search in the man page, but you have to already know the technical term for what you searching for. Your question may be "How can I do X with Y command?" which man pages often don't help.

The are only reference pages for those who already know the commands.

Better ways to learn are to search the internet, specifically the awesome unix.stackexchange.com, and best yet work with someone who knows more than you who wants to help you. At my workplace, there are several Linux experts, and we regularly chat about ways to accomplish our problems in the shell.

Once you learn them, you will enable yourself to do very very powerful things that would take special commands in special apps, which you have to download, install, and perhaps purchase. Such as grepping an entire codebase for a string, as a small example.

Learning a unix shell is like learning a programming language that works on pipes. There is a hump to get over, and once you do, you will be able to express precisely what you want to with your computer. As far as you're concerned, it's the language of the operating system, allowing you absolute control.

Because of my awesome co-workers, I now work daily, productively, in the shell. I use cygwin on windows to develop on remote and virtualized unix environments, and the experience is seamless.

Only just getting to grips with it the past year and even then I'm not doing anything in the way of advanced. I have, however, found knowing only a subset of its features has dramatically improved my efficiency at the terminal. Awk and sed have been a useful learn too - I need to check out gawk. Apparently if trying to use awk and grep (emphasis on trying), I should just use gawk.

Blatant plug: My pain at all these unnecessary hieroglyphics & man page work is why I built Crab, so I could use SQL to find things and an EXEC command to run commands on them.

etia.co.uk

Really it shouldn't have to be this hard.

Personal Experience: Implement a command line stack machine like an RPN calculator and it'll click. Every argument normally just pop's the next arg to determine its state. I purposely made myself use find for about 6 months and I still struggle with flags sometimes, especially when chaining more complex expressions.

Find is nirvana with SSD's. I can throw find commands at the root -exec'ing out to grep on my 512GB SSD very quickly.

Lastly cygwin + find is still faster then windows explorer search in my experience, especially if you have an SSD. This is a great way to start teaching yourself unix command line also.

I combine "find ./" and grep instead of learning how to use find. (I'm a terrible person.)

xargs is worse than find, I'd say, on account of its useless default mode of operation.

If it accepted newline-delimited input, it would cater for every non-pathological case, rather than (as it does now) failing miserably on many reasonable file names. (Of course, you have xargs -0 - but not all tools output appropriate data. And it accepts shell-style quoting - but do we really want that contagion to spread?)

The bizarre thing is that except for oddities like `echo * | xargs', every tool I've ever met that outputs lists of file names outputs them with newline as the separator. And any that currently don't, would be better off doing that, anyway, I'd argue - since most Unix tools are line-oriented.

What do you find hard to learn about find? I don't think it's particularly hard to learn, as Unix commands go. A bit more difficult than the average command, maybe. Of course not everything about it may be well designed (as some other comments here say), but that holds true to some extent for any command or language.

I just read the original post (the store about someone writing to Dennis Ritchie) which this comment thread is about. Noticed a mention of find and cpio. So wanted to say:

find, in general, is quite a powerful command [1], and one of the ways of using it, is piping its output to cpio or other commands, to act upon the found filenames (which can include relative or full paths, depending on how you call find). There is also the -exec option to find, which can do more or less what I said above (piping find's output to other commands), but without using a pipeline.

Those are some good reasons why you might want to persevere and learn to use find, despite its awkward syntax. And it's not really that difficult.

[1] One such example is a command I used to use a lot: some variation on piping the output of find to cpio, using the -p option of cpio (for pass, IIRC). E.g.:

$ find . -name some_wildcard -print | cpio -pdmuv dirname

which would copy an entire directory subtree from one place in the file system to another (or to a place (directory) in a different file system too). (Something like XCOPY ... /s /v /e in DOS.) And those cpio options could be used to do things like keeping the permissions of the target files the same as those of the source, or not, etc. Imagine how much time that could save (over having to later manually change the permissions, after the copy, particularly when there are many files). And that's just one example of the power of fin (along with other Unix commands).

> How would you do it without find? (Serious question. I know it can be done with other tools but since I can do it in one line with find I've never bothered to look for another solution.)

With python you can do something like

    [os.unlink(file) for file in [os.path.join(*path_parts) for l in [list(zip(repeat(root),files)) for root,dirname,files in os.walk('/tmp') if len(files) != 0] for path_parts in l] if datetime.fromtimestamp(os.stat(file).st_mtime) < datetime.now() - timedelta(days=7)]

...I suspect there might be bit more elegant solutions too

In PowerShell:

    ls /dir -re | ? LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-7) | del

i.e.

1: enumerate the files recursively (ls is alias for Get-ChildItem)

2: pipe through a filter (? is alias for Where-Object) that selects only files written to more than 7 days ago

3: pipe those files to the Remove-Item command (del is alias for Remove-Item)

just tried it out - it caused iterm to crash

I am on OS X now, but I remember using `locate` on Linux to achieve something similar to OS X `mdfind`