Best way to only list files that I own

Question

What would be the best shell command "one liner" that I could use to list all of the files in a directory, only showing those that I own?

Solution 1

A short one-liner would be:

find . -maxdepth 1 -user $USER

If you're looking in the current directory, you can omit the .. If you don't know whether $USER is available, you can replace it with $LOGNAME or $(whoami).

Add -ls to show file details, e.g.:

find / -maxdepth 1 -user root -ls

If you want to supply custom flags to ls you can use it via -exec:

find / -maxdepth 1 -user root -exec ls -ld {} +

(In that case the -d flag to ls is required to list directories as themselves and not their content.)

Solution 2

Use below command

[username@localhost~]$ find / -user username -exec ls -l {} \; 2>/dev/null

find all file in the whole system owned by username. If you find from specific directory just replace the location / .

[username@localhost~]$ find /path/of/direcotry -user username -exec ls -l {} \; 2>/dev/null

NB:2>/dev/null nullify the error output.

Solution 3

Since you did not specify the format of the output, you could also do this with ls and grep:

ls -lG | grep username

First we use ls with the -l parameter, to get the listing which includes username and groupname.

Then we prune the groupname from the result with the -G parameter.

After that, we simply pipe it to grep and get all of the results with the desired username.

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not a safe or bulletproof solution - however, depending on your circumstances, it might be a quick & dirty one. Interactively, it might be acceptable, but you should not use it in any scripts!

Comments

[user]

You really shouldn't parse the output of ls.

[terdon]

Not to mention that this will find files named username, or foousername or owned by username2.

[Kusalananda]

It's better to use $LOGNAME as it's guaranteed to contain the user's login name on all Unices. $USER may not exist everywhere on non-Linux Unices.

[drHogan]

I agree that this answer is not safe. Anyways, this is what I'm always doing interactively, ll | grep user. Most of my interactive grep usage is not rock solid but less typing is more important here.

[Kusalananda]

Also, rather than -exec ls ... you could use -ls.

[Arminius]

I don't think OP wants to look recursively. Also, your first example repeats file names unnecessarily.