GNU find
Hacker ApprovedRanked 12 of 86 privilege escalation tools by recommenders
People recommend find for fast, flexible file searching and for combining with xargs; the most common caveat is its arcane, hard-to-remember syntax.
People recommend find for fast, flexible file searching and for combining with xargs; the most common caveat is its arcane, hard-to-remember syntax.
37 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 27
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 73%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 27 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast file searching
“the Linux `find` and `grep` commands usually can find stuff much quicker than any 'accelerated' and 'cached' desktop search”
Comment from 15 Sep 2026 in “iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27” “a find oneliner is still the fastest way to find things”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?” “grep and find in the terminal are much faster”
Comment from 9 Aug 2026 in “Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM” - Comment from 26 Dec 2025 in “Unix "find" expressions compiled to bytecode”
Flexible and powerful for searches
“It's such a useful and powerful tool but it's arguments get me on a regular basis.”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “git's –end-of-options Flag” “find is usually more flexible than ls for anything but the most trivial”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead (2016)” Pairs well with xargs
“no additional software required, since your machine already has cron, find and xargs on it”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root” “It's the answer to 95% of the problems with `find | xargs`.”
Comment from 21 Jul 2026 in “I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs” Already installed on Unix systems
“no additional software required, since your machine already has cron, find and xargs on it”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root” “macOS is POSIX compatible, so find(1)”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Arcane, hard-to-remember syntax
“Find works, but the syntax is arcane.”
Comment from 21 Jul 2026 in “I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs” “Find works, but the syntax is arcane”
Comment from 21 Jul 2026 in “I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs” “find is arcane in its invocation, differs between Unix flavors”
Comment from 30 Dec 2025 in “You Need to Ditch VS Code” - Comment from 17 Sep 2026 in “Small programming tricks”
- Comment from 30 Dec 2025 in “You Need to Ditch VS Code”
Differs between Unix systems
“find is arcane in its invocation, differs between Unix flavors”
Comment from 30 Dec 2025 in “You Need to Ditch VS Code” “macOS: the find there requires the starting-point arg”
Comment from 17 Sep 2026 in “Small programming tricks”
Other privilege escalation tools people recommend
The four most recommended other privilege escalation tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 86 privilege escalation tools, rankedWhat people said
38 of the 41 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“advanced tools like 'find' or 'xargs'”
“Something about the find syntax never sat well with me”
“macOS: the find there requires the starting-point arg”
“find is absolute agony once you get a taste of fd.”
“They only need to hallucinate a little to destroy your filesystem.”
“the Linux `find` and `grep` commands usually can find stuff much quicker than any 'accelerated' and 'cached' desktop search”
“GNU find can visit arbitrarily deep directories”
“a simple non-Cargo command (like find) has a lot of advantages for me”
“I personally appreciated having the `find` command”
“grep and find in the terminal are much faster”
“A simple solution is to use find, which handles that for you”
“It's such a useful and powerful tool but it's arguments get me on a regular basis.”
“sure, but what about the even easier solution?”
“Find works, but the syntax is arcane.”
“Find works, but the syntax is arcane”
“It's definitely the simplest”
“find . -name '*.log' -print0 | xargs -0 rm”
“It's the answer to 95% of the problems with `find | xargs`.”
“The problem with find is that you can't specify the maximum tolerated command line lengths, and find hasn't historically been very smart about it”
“whereas find just fits as many as it can.”
“They still work exactly the same, and now even my agents can do it.”
“`find` and associated aliases works perfectly when I don't.”
“GNU Find can search down multiple directories in parallel”
“I know I'm getting "live" results from the filesystem”
“no additional software required, since your machine already has cron, find and xargs on it”
“most of the users will probably find it handy for the tricky find tool”
“like a find that can't -exec arbitrary programs”
“They are very fast on a modern system with SSD.”
“a find oneliner is still the fastest way to find things”
“macOS is POSIX compatible, so find(1)”
“find is usually more flexible than ls for anything but the most trivial”
“the experience is horrible”
“I always have to look up find and xargs syntax.”
“find is arcane in its invocation, differs between Unix flavors”
“a client side "search router" supporting custom bangs”
“That's what allows find(1) to be so quick”
“find and grep do similar things but work entirely differently and their args aren't even in the same format”
“The fact GNU `find` is easily replaceable is precisely a sign that it follows the Unix philosophy well.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.