Finding files on your system doesn’t have to be about clicking…

Since the wayback days I have found more success in quickly finding files in Windows from the cmd prompt rather than Explorer. My typical recipe for success is to open a command prompt as administrator, then cd \ to the root, and then search for what I am looking for with dir /s *.qbw. This nets me a nice easy to read list of files. That is usually enough. But sometimes I need to find something a little more specific. Let’s look at a few examples.

Refining a search to give me less results

Let’s say I want to do that same search in either Linux (including MacOS) or in Windows, but only look for files that include JPTechnical in the name. In Windows I would then pipe that search to the find command, ala dir /s *.qbw | find "JPTechnical". In Linux, it would look a little different, find . -iname '*.md' would find all the .md files in the current directory, I would pipe this into grep to filter that with find . -iname '*.md' | JPTechnical for find any Markdown format files with JPTechnical in the name.

This is also fairly simple, it is just a little magic with pipes. Let’s dig deeper with a more complex search.

Finding files modified AFTER a specific date

Let’s imagine you are backing up your computer, and you have a BUNCH of extra files that you know you haven’t touched in years. As a matter of fact, I am doing just that for a client right now, I am looking for recently modified files so that their new computer will not have so much cruft left over from so many years ago. So let’s look at how to find files modified after a specific date on both Linux (and MacOS) systems as well as Windows systems.

In Linux using the find command…

To search for any files in my git folder in my home folder modified since yesterday I would use the following search:

find ~/git -newermt '2021-01-26T00:00:00'

What does this do?

• -newermt is looking for anything newer than the modified time that follows.

Here is a great cheat sheet for how to use the find command.

In Windows Command Prompt…

To search for any files in a specific user’s Desktop that has been modified AFTER 1-1-2019, use the following search:

c:\>forfiles /P c:\users\jp\Desktop /S /D +01/01/2019

What does this do?

• /P is where you specifiy the <pathname>, in our case it is c:\users\jp\Desktop.
• /S is recursive
• /D +01/01/2019 is the date later than, as specified by the + the date.

For the full docs, see here, and here is a great cheat sheet.

Embrace the console!

Searching can be quite a bit more enjoyable than double-clicking your way through endless folders in Windows Explorer. Any of these commands can be redirected to a file that can be further searched, or retained for other use. Embrace the console!