How can I find a file/directory that could be anywhere on linux command line?

linux find ksh locate which
johncorser picture johncorser · Jul 9, 2014 · Viewed 114.6k times · Source

Ideally, I would be able to use a program like 

find [file or directory name]

to report the paths with matching filenames/directories. Unfortunately this seems to only check the current directory, not the entire folder.

I've also tried locate and which, but none find the file, even though I know its on the computer somewhere.

Answer

Russell Uhl picture Russell Uhl · Jul 9, 2014

"Unfortunately this seems to only check the current directory, not the entire folder". Presumably you mean it doesn't look in subdirectories. To fix this, use find -name "filename"

If the file in question is not in the current working directory, you can search your entire machine via 

find / -name "filename"

This also works with stuff like find / -name "*.pdf", etc. Sometimes I like to pipe that into a grep statement as well (since, on my machine at least, it highlights the results), so I end up with something like 

find / -name "*star*wars*" | grep star

Doing this or a similar method just helps me instantly find the filename and recognize if it is in fact the file I am looking for.

Related questions

How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?

I'm trying to find a way to scan my entire Linux system for all files containing a specific string of text. Just to clarify, I'm looking for text within the file, not in the file name. When I was looking …

Read More
How to exclude a directory in find . command

I'm trying to run a find command for all JavaScript files, but how do I exclude a specific directory? Here is the find code we're using. for file in $(find . -name '*.js') do java -jar config/yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar --type …

Read More
Chmod recursively

I have an archive, which is archived by someone else, and I want to automatically, after I download it, to change a branch of the file system within the extracted files to gain read access. (I can't change how archive …

Read More