GNU find is a powerful command-line utility that lets you search for files and folders in a hierarchical tree directory structure. It is the backend for all those utilities out there like the graphical searching in KDE or GNOME. However, find can be a little hard to handle at first by beginners.

The first of the bashshell.net "5 Days of find" series, this tutorial breaks down the basics of the find command. With the Linux find utility, you can perform powerful searches on just about any criterion you can think of, and then, from the same command-line entry, invoke another utility to do whatever you need to do with the results.

A video howto for using the command line to find files with the "find" command.

Backups are essential, and so is the reducing the time needed to perform those backups. Many’s the time I have sat waiting for a backup to complete only to remember that I had a link to a large set of files, or a bunch of ISO files in the ./download directory, and had to migrate those over to somewhere else and restart the backup.