[Chapter 17] 17.15 Searching for Files by Permission
Author: Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly & Mike Loukides
Date: 1998-08-04T21:38:29Z

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| Chapter 17 Finding Files with find |

## 17.15 Searching for Files by Permission

[If you aren't comfortable with octal numbers and the way UNIX uses them in file permissions, article 1.23in is good background reading. -JP]

find can look for files with specific permissions. It uses an octal number for these permissions. The string `rw-rw-r--` indicates that you and members of your group have read and write permission, while the world has read-only privilege. The same permissions are expressed as an octal number as 664. To find all *.o files with the above permissions, use:

>     % find . -name \*.o -perm 664 -print

To see if you have any directories with write permission for everyone, use:

>     % find . -type d -perm 777 -print

The examples above only match an exact combination of permissions. If you wanted to find all directories with group write permission, you want to match the pattern `--w--`. There are several combinations that can match. You could list each combination, but find allows you to specify a pattern that can be bit-wise ANDed with the permissions of the file. Simply put a minus sign (-) before the octal value. The group write permission bit is octal 20, so the following negative value:

>     % find . -perm -20 -print

will match the following common permissions:

Permission | Octal Value
--- | ---
`rwxrwxrwx` | 777
`rwxrwxr-x` | 775
`rw-rw-rw-` | 666
`rw-rw-r--` | 664
`rw--rw----` | 660

If you wanted to look for files that you can execute (i.e., shell scripts or programs), you want to match the pattern `-x---` by typing:

>     % find . -perm -100 -print

When the -perm argument has a minus sign, all of the permission bits are examined, including the set user ID bits (1.23).

- BB

17.14 Searching for Files by Size |  | 17.16 Searching by Owner and Group