ubuntu - find . file -/+ size except *.filetype

ubuntu find filesize

07
2014-07

natethegreat141990

Alright what I am looking for is a way to do something that can find all files less than size except filenames with an extension or more. May be more than one.

find . -type f -size -20M -name /! -name *.mp3 -delete

From some of the things I found online I thought that this would be what I was looking for but it is not working. Pretty much I am looking for this

find . -type f -size -/+ size (except) *.ext -delete

What do you think?

Answers

garyjohn

! is the find not operator. So to exclude files ending in .ext from the results, include the term ! -name \*.ext.

For numeric arguments such as file size, a prefix of + means greater than and a prefix of - means less than. So to find a file larger than 12 kilobytes (really kibibytes) and smaller than 500 Megabytes (really Mebibytes), include the terms -size +12k and -size -500M.

Your second example would then look something like this.

find . -type f -size +12k -size -500M ! -name \*.ext -delete

In the mean time..

This definitely works (and is definitely overkill):

find /to/my/directory -type f | egrep "(txt|css)$" | xargs -t -i{} chmod a-x {}

Explanation:

The find command will list all files, links and directories, each on a separate line. The path name specifies the starting point. The -type f option specifies to find files only.

the egrep command will output every line that matches the regular expression. The "(txt|css)$" regular expression says to match every file that ends with ($) with txt or css.

the xargs command will take the output of a command and pipe it into the input of another command (which comes after it). for example:

$> echo a\nb\nc 
a
b
c

$> echo a\nb\n\c | xargs echo
a b c

so normally, you could do find -type f | xargs echo but the output can sometimes get really long if you have alot of files, so i find it better to break it up. soo. the -i option executes the command for each line of output, the value of each line is stored in a variable, i defined as {}. the -t command outputs each command that is generated to the std out so you can see what is happening.

Ryan Thompson

As an answer to your actual question, the find | xargs solution is the right one.

However, to address your root problem, it is impossible to correctly restore all the file permissions without a reference. If you have the space, you could create a virtual machine, install all the same packages (to find out how, search for dpkg get set selections) as your real machine, and then "copy" the permissions using chmod's --reference option.

If you decide to go this route, I can edit my post with more detailed instructions.

Peter Cordes

Ah, finding out the hard way you should have used tar to back / restore. :(

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec chmod -x {} +

Or with any other selector you want, e.g. find -regextype posix-extended . -type f -iregex '.*\.(txt|css|html)' -exec chmod -x {} +

Actually, hardly anything in your home directory should be executable, so I'd start with just find -type f (without -name), and then make things executable as necessary. Maybe chmod to mode 664, if you ended up with everything mode 777, since you don't want world write permission on your files (or directories either). So actually, chmod o-w -R ~ is a good idea.

Some files should not be readable by other users on the same machine, e.g. ~/.bash_history, ~/.ssh, ~/Mail, and so (based on what I have in my home directory that might actually matter)

    cd
    chmod 600 .bash_history .esd_auth .githistory  .ICEauthority .lesshst .mcoprc .netrc* .pulse-cookie .recently-used* .viminfo .Xauthority .xsession-errors
    chmod 700 .dbus .gconf* .gnome* .gnupg .icedteaplugin .kde .macromedia .metacity Mail .mozilla .openoffice.org* .pulse .purple .Skype .ssh .thumbnails .tsclient .update-notifier

    chmod 2700 .gnupg  # super-ultra-paranoid, I guess.
    chmod 500 .gvfs  # gvfs is weird, and maybe not present on current ubuntu?

copy/paste that into a terminal. Don't worry about errors, I'm sure you don't have all the same dotfiles and directories I do. (and I left out a lot of obscure ones that are really just game save directories, and could be publicly readable without harm.) Generally, if you don't want your pr0n stash or any mention of it to show up in other users' locate results, or other searches, make sure your history files and so on are private.

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ubuntu - find . file -/+ size except *.filetype

In the mean time..