[SOLVED] Why do I get a stream of "permission denied" errors when using the find command on kali linux

Issue

I am new to using Kali and I learned about the find command and wanted to try it out. I created a file called "Test" in my /home/kali/Documents Directory. Then I moved back to the [/] directory and used the command find -name Test

To my suprise, I recieved a plethora of errors and messages and I don't know what they mean or why they are popping up. Am I using the wrong command or using the wrong switches? In the examples I saw, the output was the directory of where the file was. What command and flags/switches do I use to find the exact location of the "Test" file i created in my Documents directory

This is the command I wrote to the terminal

This is the output I recieved (This is just a small piece of it)

Solution

The find command recursively search each file in each directory you provide:

find /home/kali /root -name test

This will search for a file or directory named test in the directories /home/kali and /root. By default, if you don't provide any directory, find will search in the current working directory named .. So in your case, these 3 commands are equivalent (because you are in the directory /):

find -name test
find . -name test
find / -name test

Now for your question. As I said, find will recursively look in every directory in each directory you provide (in your case the implied CWD . e.g. /).

This means that find will look for test in /, /dev, /root, /proc, ... and then in each subdirectory.

If you take /root for example, it belongs to the root user. If you look at the permissions on /root, you will find the following:

$ ls -l /
...
drwxr-x---  10 root root 4,0K 11 mai   20:17 root
...

As you can see, /root belongs to the root user and the root group as indicated by root root in the middle (the first refers to the owner and the second to the group). The letters at the left drwxr-x--- show the permissions on this directory:

• d means that it's a directory
• rwx means that the owner (root in this case) has the right to read, write and execute this file.
• r-x means that the group root (users belonging to the group root i.e. only root in practice) can read and execute this file.
• --- means that other users (i.e. kali for example) have no right on this file

Now what does it means to have the read, write and execute rights. For a regular file, it's straight forward but for a directory it gets a bit tricky:

• read means that you can list the files/directories inside this directory
• write means that you can add file/directories in this directory
• execute means that you can cd into this directory or use this directory inside of a path

As other users (such as kali) have no rights on /root, find will fail with a permission denied error.

If you have the sudo rights on your machine, try:

sudo find / -name test

And this should work (although it will take some time to search your whole filesystem).

Answered By - Guillaume Courrier