Equivalent of forfiles.exe in Linux

Question

sorry if this is asked before but, I was curious about what is the equivalent Linux command of forfiles.exe in Windows? This came to my mind when I saw this question

Answer 1

find is the full-powered replacement, but for simple operations on files in the current directory this sh-script can be pretty useful (and easier to read/write) as well:

for file in *.jpg; do
  echo "do something with $file"
done

Answer 2

The find command does what you want. Here's an example:

find /mnt/Pictures -name '*.jpg' \! -mtime 7 -exec rm {} \;

This will delete all the jpg files from /mnt/Pictures, which have not been modified in the last 7 days (168 hours). If you don't care about the case of the filenames use -iname instead of -name.

Here's a correspondence between the parameters of forfiles and the parameters of find:

• /p → the path is the first argument of find.
• /s → by default find searches in all subdirectories. To disable this use the -maxdepth option with a value of 1, i.e. -maxdepth 1.
• /c → -exec. Also replace @file with {} and don't forget to end the command with \; (many beginners are bit by this error).
• /d → -mtime n. File's data was last modified n*24 hours ago

! negates the condition. ! is a special character under some shells, including Bash, so it needs to be escaped or quoted, therefore you'll write \! most of the time.

Answer 3

I think find provides the functionality that forfiles offers.

Answer 4

You can create a cron job that uses find with the appropriate arguments, e.g. -mtime +7