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Is there a way to display all the information that -l does in ls (permissions, dates, etc.) when using the locate or find commands?

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Not just for "ls -l" but for whatever action you'd want to perform to your locate or find results you can use xargs or in the case of find the -exec flag. Here are examples to achieve what you want to do:

In the case of locate you can use xargs:

locate something | xargs ls -l

Xargs can be used for find too, but find has the -exec flag that allow to optimize further actions with find results; for example

find . -iname something -exec ls -l '{}' \;
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This is the more general approach compare to mine. But I would generally recommend to use xargs for find as well, as it handles large result sets better (-exec spawns a new process for every file while xargs groups them to create as few processes as possible). – SvW Aug 5 '11 at 15:52
When find returns a huge amount of lines you might have problems to buffer all of them. Also with -exec you process the result as soon as it appears and you don't have to wait the end of the find process to start the xargs part. – hmontoliu Aug 5 '11 at 15:55
2  
if execing things I find it better to use + e.g. find . -exec ls -l '{}' +. This reduces the number of calls to exec as + puts many of the files found on one command line. – Iain♦ Aug 5 '11 at 16:04
xargs starts working as soon as it has enough data. – SvW Aug 5 '11 at 16:05
Awesome - this is exactly what I wanted to know and am going to go learn more about xargs. Thanks! – Ryan Jurgensen Aug 5 '11 at 16:20
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up vote 3 down vote

I am not sure what you want to do, but try 

find . -ls
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up vote 1 down vote

You can use -printf and a suitable format string

 find ./ -printf "%M\t%n\t%u\t%g\t%s\t%t%f\n"
  • %M Symbolic permissions
  • %n hard links
  • %u username or numeric user id
  • %g group name or numeric group id
  • %s file size in bytes
  • %t last modification time
  • %f filename
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up vote 0 down vote

One more option:

find | while read a; do ls -l "$a"; done
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