Searching for files?

Nobody is a exception for searching files unless you don’t have a computer. here are two commands you must learn if you are a beginner. find command

$ find /path/ -name file_name

example:

$ find . -name "date*"

Notice the ‘.’ which says search in the current directory for files starting with “date” , you can use your regular expression skill here. And you if you want to search for file starting from the root just replace ‘.’ with ‘/’.

$ find / -name file.txt

-name option where you will specify your file names, use -iname option for case insensitivity.

You might also filter the files with their type -type for example

$ find /home -name file.txt -type f

‘f’ following -type says file.txt is a file, or use ‘d’ instead if you are looking for directories, or ‘s’ for block files.

There are two more important option. If you know that your files are buried many levels below, without wasting time, you mention the level from where the search should begin using -mindepth.

$ find / -mindepth 3 -iname file.tex 

Same way -maxdepth says how far you should go searching for the file. locate command

locate is a simple and fast searching tool (faster than find). It searches from the database of files and folders which it maintains. You can manually update the database with

$ updatedb

and locating is as simple as this

$ locate file.txt