Why does the find command also return the directories?

Question

I created a empty directories, and executed the following in the terminal

mael@mael-HP:~/repertoireVide$ mkdir -p a/b/c
mael@mael-HP:~/repertoireVide$ mkdir -p a/a/b
mael@mael-HP:~/repertoireVide$ mkdir -p b/a
mael@mael-HP:~/repertoireVide$ echo "c" > a/c
mael@mael-HP:~/repertoireVide$ echo "c" > c

Tree shows the following mael@mael-HP:~/repertoireVide$ tree

.
├── a
│  ├── a
│  │  └── b
│  ├── b
│  │  └── c
│  └── c
├── b
│  └── a
└── c
7 directories, 2 files

Why does the following find command output this

mael@mael-HP:~/repertoireVide$ find .
.
./a
./a/a
./a/a/b
./a/c
./a/b
./a/b/c
./c
./b
./b/a

Isn't find only suppose the look for FILES inside the specified directories, as per the man find:

find - search for files in a directory hierarchy

Why are all the sub-directories listed with the files ?

Thanks.

• jesse_b: Everything in unix type operating systems is a file. Your keyboard is a file, your hard drive is a file, find itself is a file.
• Kamil Maciorowski: People saying "files" when they mean only "regular files" are not really POSIX-compliant. :)

Answer 1

Directories are files. Find can look for regular-type files using the -type option:

find . -type f ...

Or for directory type files:

find . -type d ...

---

-type t

True if the file is of the specified type. Possible file types are as follows:

b block special
c character special
d directory
f regular file
l symbolic link
p FIFO
s socket