has been turned off with -noleaf, the directory entry will always be examined and the
diagnostic message will be issued where it is appropriate. Symbolic links cannot be used to create filesystem cycles as such, but if the -L option or the -follow option is in use, a diagnostic message is issued when
find encounters a loop of symbolic links. As with loops containing hard links, the leaf optimisation will often mean that find knows that it doesn’t need to call stat() or chdir() on the symbolic link, so this diag‐
nostic is frequently not necessary.
The -d option is supported for compatibility with various BSD systems, but you should use the POSIX‐compliant option -depth instead.
The POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable does not affect the behaviour of the -regex or -iregex tests because those tests aren’t specified in the POSIX standard.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
LANG Provides a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null.
LC_ALL If set to a non‐empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.
LC_COLLATE
The POSIX standard specifies that this variable affects the pattern matching to be used for the -name option. GNU find uses the fnmatch(3) library function, and so support for LC_COLLATE depends on the system
library. This variable also affects the interpretation of the response to -ok; while the LC_MESSAGES variable selects the actual pattern used to interpret the response to -ok, the interpretation of any bracket
expressions in the pattern will be affected by LC_COLLATE.
LC_CTYPE
This variable affects the treatment of character classes used in regular expressions and also with the -name test, if the system’s fnmatch(3) library function supports this. This variable also affects the in‐
terpretation of any character classes in the regular expressions used to interpret the response to the prompt issued by -ok. The LC_CTYPE environment variable will also affect which characters are considered
to be unprintable when filenames are printed; see the section UNUSUAL FILENAMES.
LC_MESSAGES
Determines the locale to be used for internationalised messages. If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, this also determines the interpretation of the response to the prompt made by the -ok ac‐
tion.
NLSPATH
Determines the location of the internationalisation message catalogues.
PATH Affects the directories which are searched to find the executables invoked by -exec, -execdir, -ok and -okdir.
POSIXLY_CORRECT
Determines the block size used by -ls and -fls. If POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, blocks are units of 512 bytes. Otherwise they are units of 1024 bytes.
Setting this variable also turns off warning messages (that is, implies -nowarn) by default, because POSIX requires that apart from the output for -ok, all messages printed on stderr are diagnostics and must
result in a non‐zero exit status.
When POSIXLY_CORRECT is not set, -perm +zzz is treated just like -perm /zzz if +zzz is not a valid symbolic mode. When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, such constructs are treated as an error.
When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, the response to the prompt made by the -ok action is interpreted according to the system’s message catalogue, as opposed to according to find’s own message translations.
TZ Affects the time zone used for some of the time‐related format directives of -printf and -fprintf.
EXAMPLES
Simple ‘find|xargs‘ approach
• Find files named core in or below the directory /tmp and delete them.
$ find /tmp -name core -type f -print | xargs /bin/rm -f
Note that this will work incorrectly if there are any filenames