How to search for files with Linux?

Question

Do you know a good way to find a file or content by name recursively similar to the ms-windows function search with Linux? I can do find . | grep test.html suspecting it's not the best. Thanks for any answer.

For instance, running find . | grep terms.htmlgives my expected result while locate terms.html doesn't even though locate gets updated db - it might have to do with that it's an USB stick the file is on?

Solution 1

The command is find, like this

 find . -iname '*hellofiles*'

you say find ·location· -iname means not case sensitive and in the '' is a regular expression if you wish.

find /home/user -iname '*zip' will find you all the zip files in /home/user

If you want a faster lookup you can use locate, there is a utility which scanns the disc regulary, like every week or day dependin on how it is setup

locate myfile

and it will look in the database if updatedb has seen myfile anywhere.

Solution 2

In case of packages: dpkg -L packagename

or if you know that it is in a particular folder, add the use of grep, like:

dpkg -L packagename | grep foldername

For example you just installed Chromium and you need to know where is the bin

dpkg -L chromium-browser | grep bin

Solution 3

find has a number of options that allow it to find files by name, regular expressions or even more complex criteria such as size or ownership. E.g.

find . -iname '*.txt'

See also the example section in the linked manual page.

That said, find has the distinct disadvantage of searching the filesystem each time that you call it. The locate utility, in its many variations, on the other hand, uses a regularly-updated database of the files in your system.

Solution 4

find ./ -name "filename" or you can do something like find ./ -name "*.jar" to find all the files with the .jar extension. You can also do find ./ -name "*.jar" | xargs grep -n 'main' to find all the .jar files that contain a main in them.

Solution 5

find . -name test.html or you can use wildcards too: find . -name \*test.html

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Comments

[Rich Homolka]

locate does do shell globs a.k.a. wildcards. You may need to quote your pattern then. You can also use the -r flag to use regular expressions.

[Niklas Rosencrantz]

Thanks! The command find . -iname privacy.html gives the expected result while locate doesn't (it's a file privacy.html I serched after on a USB memory)

[Niklas Rosencrantz]

This has helped me many times rather than locate