Using the Find Command in Linux

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There are many times when we need to find files in Linux to solve a current issue.  Sometimes we need to find a certain file that may have been scanned while troubleshooting a webdav problem, etc.  You can use the find command to search and find a file.find [directories] [expression]

I created a directory called “/opt/findme” and at that location touched a file called “samplefile.here”.  From my home directory I did a search starting from the “root” directory using the find command to locate that file.

user@user-desktop:~$ pwd

/home/user – shows my current location, my home directory

You will need to use admin privileges (sudo) to do the search because you won’t have permission to look through the /opt directory otherwise.  After “sudo find”, you can specify “/” to start searching from the root directory.  Then to specify a search by name you would use, “- name”.  You can put a pattern in case you aren’t sure of the complete filename (you can use wildcards including ‘?’), but in the example below the extension is “here” so we used “*.here” and then “–print”, to show the location.

user@user-desktop:~$ sudo find / -type f -name *.here -print

/opt/findme/samplefile.here – the results “samplefile.here” in “/opt/findme/”

user@user-desktop:~$

You can also look at the “man page” for find to see what options are available for this command.

user@user-desktop:~$   man find – to display help for the find or any other command

FIND(1)
FIND(1)

NAME
       find – search for files in a directory hierarchy

SYNOPSIS
       find [-H] [-L] [-P] [-D debugopts] [-Olevel] [path…] [expression]

DESCRIPTION
       This  manual page documents the GNU version of find.  GNU find searches
       the directory tree rooted at each given file  name  by evaluating  the
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