find
will find all files that match a pattern:
find . -name "*foo"
However, if you want a picture:
tree -P "*foo"
Hope this helps!
Following command will list down all the files having exact name "pattern" (for example) in current and its sub folders.
find ./ -name "pattern"
fd
In case, find
is too slow, try fd
utility - a simple and fast alternative to find
written in Rust.
Syntax:
fd PATTERN
Demo:
Homepage: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
If your shell supports a new globbing option (can be enabled by: shopt -s globstar
), you can use:
echo **/*foo*
to find any files or folders recursively. This is supported by Bash 4, zsh and similar shells.
Personally I've got this shell function defined:
f() { find . -name "*$1*"; }
Note: Above line can be pasted directly to shell or added into your user's ~/.bashrc
file.
Then I can look for any files by typing:
f some_name
Alternatively you can use a fd
utility with a simple syntax, e.g. fd pattern
.
If you want to search special file with wildcard, you can used following code:
find . -type f -name "*.conf"
Suppose, you want to search every .conf files from here:
.
means search started from here (current place)
-type
means type of search item that here is file (f).
-name
means you want to search files with *.conf names.
for file search
find / -xdev -name settings.xml
--> whole computer
find ./ -xdev -name settings.xml
--> current directory & its sub directory
for files with extension type
find . -type f -name "*.iso"
This will search all the related files in current and sub directories, calculating their line count separately as well as totally:
find . -name "*.wanted" | xargs wc -l
Use
find path/to/dir -name "*.ext1" -o -name "*.ext2"
Explanation
find
does recursion.-o
stands for -or
. So above means search for this wildcard OR this one. If you have only one pattern then no need for -o
.Below command helps to search for any files
1) Irrespective of case
2) Result Excluding folders without permission
3) Searching from the root or from the path you like. Change / with the path you prefer.
Syntax :
find -iname '' 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"
Example
find / -iname 'C*.xml' 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"
find / -iname '*C*.xml' 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"
find <directory_path> -type f -name "<wildcard-match>"
In the wildcard-match you can provide the string you wish to match e.g. *.c (for all c files)
Piping find into grep is often more convenient; it gives you the full power of regular expressions for arbitrary wildcard matching.
For example, to find all files with case insensitive string "foo" in the filename:
~$ find . -print | grep -i foo
I am surprised to see that locate is not used heavily when we are to go recursively.
I would first do a locate "$PWD" to get the list of files in the current folder of interest, and then run greps on them as I please.
locate "$PWD" | grep -P <pattern>
Of course, this is assuming that the updatedb is done and the index is updated periodically. This is much faster way to find files than to run a find and asking it go down the tree. Mentioning this for completeness. Nothing against using find, if the tree is not very heavy.
find -L . -name "foo*"
In a few cases, I have needed the -L parameter to handle symbolic directory links. By default symbolic links are ignored. In those cases it was quite confusing as I would change directory to a sub-directory and see the file matching the pattern but find would not return the filename. Using -L solves that issue. The symbolic link options for find are -P -L -H
Default way to search for recursive file, and available in most cases is
find . -name "filepattern"
It starts recursive traversing for filename or pattern from within current directory where you are positioned. With find command, you can use wildcards, and various switches, to see full list of options, type
man find
or if man pages aren't available at your system
find --help
However, there are more modern and faster tools then find, which are traversing your whole filesystem and indexing your files, one such common tool is locate or slocate/mlocate, you should check manual of your OS on how to install it, and once it's installed it needs to initiate database, if install script don't do it for you, it can be done manually by typing
sudo updatedb
And, to use it to look for some particular file type
locate filename
Or, to look for filename or patter from within current directory, you can type:
pwd | xargs -n 1 -I {} locate "filepattern"
It will look through its database of files and quickly print out path names that match pattern that you have typed.
To see full list of locate's options, type:
locate --help
or man locate
Additionally you can configure locate to update it's database on scheduled times via cron job, so sample cron which updates db at 1AM would look like:
0 1 * * * updatedb
These cron jobs need to be configured by root, since updatedb needs root privilege to traverse whole filesystem.
You can use:
# find . -type f -name 'text_for_search'
If you want use REGX use -iname
# find . -type f -iname 'text_for_search'
Source: Stackoverflow.com