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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!

Mail suggestions and bug reports for these programs to bug-findutils@gnu.org. Please include the version number, which you can get by running find --version.