find

read-only

Walks a directory tree and prints what matches — big files, empty folders, leftovers.

Command: adb shell find
Commands: Files and storage
Risk: read-only

Syntax

find <path> [-type f|d] [-size +<N><suffix>] [-empty] [-maxdepth <n>] [-iname <pattern>] [-printf <format> | -exec stat -c <format> {} +]

Flags and arguments

Token	Meaning
-type f \| d	Regular files, or directories.
-size +<N><suffix>	Bigger than N units. Always write the suffix: `c` bytes, `k` KiB, `m` MiB, `g` GiB — a bare number means 512-byte blocks and, on newer builds, something worse.
-empty	Directories with nothing in them, or empty files.
-maxdepth <n>	How deep to descend.
-iname <pattern>	Case-insensitive name match. Quote the pattern so the device shell leaves it alone.
-printf <format>Android 11+	Print chosen fields per match: `%s` size in bytes, `%p` path, `%T@` modification time.

Examples

```
find /sdcard -type f -size +100M
```
Every file over 100 MiB in shared storage.
```
find /sdcard -type d -empty
```
Empty directories — the litter left behind by uninstalled apps.

find /sdcard/Download -maxdepth 1 -type f -iname '*.apk'

Installers you downloaded and forgot.

Reading the output

One matching path per line by default. To get sizes in the same pass, either `-printf` on Android 11 and later or `-exec stat -c … {} +` everywhere — a second `stat` per file is both slow over a cable and racy.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
<path>	One match per line.
%s	File size in bytes.
%p	The path.
%T@	Modification time as seconds, then a nanosecond count rather than a decimal fraction — `…0.5` means five nanoseconds.
find: bad arg '-printf'	Android 10 or earlier. Fall back to `-exec stat`.

Version and vendor notes

Android's `find` is toybox, not GNU, and `-size` behaves differently: the unit multiplier is applied only when the argument ends in a digit. With an explicit suffix the comparison is against bytes directly and there is no rounding up to whole units.
A bare `-size +100` is a bug waiting to happen. On Android 10 to 14 it means 100 times 512 bytes; on newer upstream code the internal units are negative, which makes `+N` match every file on the device.
`m` is 1024 squared, not a million. Only a trailing `d` would switch to powers of 1000.
Pass `-type f` explicitly. `-size` implying a regular file is newer than every shipping Android this family supports.

We have a UI for this

Android Storage Analyzer runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.

Open Android Storage Analyzer

Related commands

Commands that turn up in the same session as find.

Command	What it does
du	Reports how much disk space a directory tree occupies.
df	Reports free and used space per mounted filesystem.
rm	Deletes a file or a directory tree on the device.
dumpsys diskstats	Free space per partition, a disk write latency check, and a cached per-app breakdown of what is using storage.

Checked against AOSP, toybox and kernel sources while writing the parsers behind our Web ADB tools. Where a behaviour genuinely varies by Android version or manufacturer, this page says so instead of giving a number that would be wrong on half the phones out there.

Frequently asked questions

How do I run an adb shell command?

Switch on developer options and USB debugging on the phone, plug it in, then run `adb shell <command>` from a machine with platform-tools installed — or run `adb shell` on its own to get an interactive prompt and type the command without the prefix. If the command produces binary output, such as a screenshot, use `adb exec-out` instead of `adb shell`: the plain shell service attaches a terminal, which rewrites newline bytes and corrupts the data.

Do adb shell commands need root?

Not the ones on this reference. They run as the `shell` user, which can manage packages for its own Android user, read most `dumpsys` services, write the settings provider, inject input and read shared storage. Root is only needed for things this reference deliberately avoids — reading another app's private data (except through `run-as` on a debuggable build), writing system partitions, or reading `/data/anr` directly.

Why does the output look different on my phone?

Either the Android version or the manufacturer. Some flags and fields arrived in a specific release, and those are noted per command. The rest is OEM patching, which hits `dumpsys` hardest: a dump is debug output whose text is whatever the service author last printed, and manufacturers change it and backport their changes. Read fields by name rather than by position, and treat an unfamiliar shape as a difference rather than as a failure.

Can I run this from a browser instead of a terminal?

For many commands, yes — the Web ADB tools on this site talk to a phone over WebUSB from a Chromium-based desktop browser, with no SDK installed and nothing uploaded. Each page links to the tool that runs its command, when one exists. Two limits are worth knowing: only one program can hold the ADB interface at a time, so a desktop `adb server` has to be stopped first, and `adb forward` and `adb reverse` cannot work in a browser at all.

Would rather click than type? The Web ADB Toolkit runs commands like this from a browser over USB. Or browse every command.