The find command can be used to locate files within in a directory tree.
Searching for a file by name is done in the following way:
find <directoryname> -name <filename> -print
This will cause a search for the filename starting at the directory given.
After searching the parent directory, find will recursively descend into
any subdirectories of that directory. The -print option tells find
to print the absolute path to all of the occurrences of the filename in
the directory tree. As an example, to search the current directory and
all subdirectories for a file named ''core'' you would issue the following
command:
find . -name core -print
If the file is not found, then find returns
to the command prompt without doing anything. Use the -ls option to list file attributes and sizes of the files that find found.
The find command can be used to find files of a specific type, with specific attributes, or a combination of attributes.
The find command can also be used to remove files matching a pattern,
or to execute a specific command using the found files as input -exec option.
See man find for more details and options to the
find command.
Another useful command is locate. This is a command unique to the
Computer Science Suns, and is very much faster than the find command,
often completing a search in seconds, rather than tens of minutes. The
format for the command is:
locate <regexp>