Terminal Lesson 7

That gets here today. This is another terminal lesson. Now I am going to show you how to use the find utility. This find utility allows you to find files and folders on your system.

Let's start out. I defined command find space then the location we're looking in. I'm going to do dot space dash name space the name of the file or folder space dash print space to greater than / dev / null. What the to greater than / dev / null is saying is take the errors and instead of writing them to the terminal, write them to / dev / null.

You can change it to write for the errors, the dot slash desktop / error log. Now there are not going to be any errors because I'm looking right now in my home directory, which is currently dot my pwd. We hit enter, right? There is error log. So it looks like there was an error apparently or something.

Now it shows us that desktop programs is where my programs folder is, and I'm just going to throw this file out. I don't need that. Let's open up error log. No errors! It's a clean slate, great! So, I'm just going to delete error log too.

Now let's do something a little more interesting. We're going to look for programs in /. What this is going to do for us is it's going to find all the directories with the name programs that we have permissions to view. If we don't have permissions to view it, it's going to take this and write the error to my desktop under file error log.

We hit enter. Error log is here on my desktop already. There were probably already some errors. It's going to be a while before it finds my programs folder in my home directory, so I'll do a long here.

Okay, so as you can see, it has finally found programs in / user / alec / desktop / programs. I'm just going to demonstrate this to you and open up error log. We're going to see how much stuff is in here. These are all the permissions denied. These are all the files that I didn't actually have the permissions to read, which is why find brought up all this error.

Now, if I hadn't typed this error to dot slash desktop error log, which is the file right here, would have gone right to the terminal and I would be seeing it all on the terminal. You can see I can get rid of this whole thing, so it’s just up to print, and all this error crap already has come up. How nice is that?

It's so wonderful that you can just do this and pipe only errors. That's what to means. The greater than means take it to this and so and so.

Alright, now that will overwrite the last log of errors. If you want, you can do two greater than symbols there and a greater than symbol, shift shift dot shift period. So, you can do two greater than symbols there to append to that file instead of overriding that file every time that you do this command.

So, that's how to use the find function to find stuff. I showed you how to pipe the errors into a file, and yeah, that's how to use find. Congratulations! Thanks for watching, Mac heads! Be sure to watch more of our videos, and goodbye!