How to use the find command on Unix/Linux systems

Here is how to list the regular files (indicated by -type f) files generated the last 30 minutes in a particular directory on a Linux/Unix server:

find . -mmin -30 -type f -exec ls -l {} +

Another example, listing files in my audit_file_dest older than 10 days:

find /u01/admin/proddb01/adump/ -name '*.aud' -mtime +10 -exec ls -latrh {} \;

Count all files with extension ".trm" generated one day or less ago:

find . -name '*.trm' -mtime -1 -type f -exec ls -l {} + | wc -l

Count all files with extension ".trm" generated more than 30 days ago:

find . -name '*.trm' -mtime +30 -type f -exec ls -l {} + | wc -l

Find all files with timestamp new than April 15th, 16:14 in the afternoon:

export TIMENOW=`date +"%a %b %e %H:%M"`
echo $TIMENOW
Thu Apr 15 16:14
find . -type f -newermt "$TIMENOW" -exec ls -la {} \;

Find and delete can be done in different ways, the recommended way is to use the -delete option. In the command below, I want to find and delete all *.trc and *.trm files older than 10 days:

find /u01/oracle/diag/rdbms/mydb/mydb/trace -type f -name 'mydb*.tr*' -mtime +10 -delete

Delete all *.trm files in the current directory generated earlier than 24 hrs ago:

find *.trm -mmin +1440 -type f -delete

If the -delete option is not available, you can use a different method:

find /u01/oracle/diag/rdbms/mydb/mydb/trace -type f -name 'mydb*.tr*' -mtime +10 -exec rm -f {} \;

Or, using xargs, finding files older than 2 days:

find /u01/oracle/diag/rdbms/mydb/mydb/trace -type f -name 'mydb*.tr*' -mtime +2 -print0 | xargs -I {} -0 rm -v "{}"

Pipe to wc to get the number of files deleted:

find /u01/oracle/diag/rdbms/mydb/mydb/trace -type f -name 'mydb*.tr*' -mtime +2 -print0 | xargs -I {} -0 rm -v "{}" | wc -l

Some good external sources:

How To Format Date For Display or Use In a Shell Script
Linux / Unix: Find And Remove Files With One Command On Fly
Linux Find Command with Practical Examples