Find on Michael’s Domain

The find command on an old Asustor

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Instead of clicking randomly through endless hierarchies of folders on the web GUI of Asustor, you can just ssh into the device and search on the command line using find. However, there are important differences between the find command on contemporary Linux systems and the find command of ADM (the OS of Asustor NAS servers). My EOL Asustor (AS-304T) uses 3.5.9.RWM1, which uses the BusyBox find v1.19.3, while my Ubuntu Linux uses GNU find 4.9.0. BusyBox find trades features for a small binary footprint and is locked to GPL-2. On the GPL-3 side on Linux, significant new features and performance enhancements have been added. Here is the find command that you need if you want to search all disks on your Asustor:

Finding files with find

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Finding files with the find command is actually more difficult than it should be. This finds and lists the largest files (more than 200 MB) on the whole file system:find / -type f -size +200000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }'The same, but simpler syntax:find / -size +200M -lsThis finds the most recently changed files under the current directory:find . -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sortAnd this command pipes the results of the find command into another command. First find looks for Quicktime movies (based on the file extension .mov) and then ffmpeg converts them into avi files.find . -name '*.mov' -exec sh -c 'ffmpeg -i "$0" -sameq "${0%%.mov}.avi"' {} \;This commands finds and lists all filenames that contain the string ‘bitcoin’:find . -name '*bitcoin*' -lsAnd this command finds Quicktime movies and deletes them:find . -name '*.mov' -exec sh -c 'rm "$0"' {} \;And this finds files that have been modified (created or updated) during the last 2 minutes:find . -cmin 2This finds crap which you copied over from a Macintosh and which you don’t need under Linux:find . -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -deleteSimilar story here:find . -name '._*' -type f -deleteWhen being in the root directory, this should find all files with the name ‘syncthing’:find . -name 'syncthing' -lsAnd this finds all files larger than 200MB in the /home directory:find /home -size +200M -lsFind recursively all files that end in .gz and count them:find . -name '*.gz' | wc -lFind recursively all files that do NOT end in .gz and count them:find . -not -name '*.gz' | wc -lWhen you want to search recursively through the content of text files, you need to use the grep command:grep -rnw '/path/to/target-directory' -e 'pattern'When you search for PDF files modified in October 2024:sudo find / -type f -name "*.pdf" -newermt "2024-10-01" ! -newermt "2024-11-01" 2>/dev/null

Piping the output of find into a new command (find, xargs)

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

E.g. to change the permissions of all directories:find . -type d -print | xargs /bin/chmod ug+rxTo be able to handle directory names with special charactersfind . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/chmod ug+rxIn order to find all tif files in the current directory or below and to compress them (using the ImageMagick “mogrify” command and LZW compression):find . -name '*.tif' -print | xargs mogrify -compress LZWApart from the “xargs” method, some command (including find) accept the “-exec” argument. The following finds all files in the current directory that are smaller than 4k and deletes them:find . -size -4k -exec rm {} \;

Find and replace with perl

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

To replace the string jeltsch.blogspot.com by the string mnm.no-ip.com/blog you can use perl:perl -pi.bak -e 's|jeltsch.blogspot.com|mnm.no-ip.com\/blog|g' *.html If you want to do a recursive replacement on a directory tree you can try:perl -pi.bak -e 's|jeltsch.blogspot.com|mnm.no-ip.com\/blog|g' find jeltsch.org -name ‘*.html’``