Here is the video version, if you prefer it:
The find
command is used to find files. (Ward, 2014) There are a lot of options to find
, but I remember it simply as this:
find dir -name file -print
where dir
is a directory from where to start the search and file
is the file name I’m looking for. To elaborate more on the dir
part – find will find files in the directory dir
or a subdirectory of dir
, but it will not go upwards of dir
. For example, if my find
starts like this:
find /home/mislav …
it will not look outside the mislav
folder, just “further down”. That means it is impossible for me to get a result such as /home/jellyfish/…
.
-name
is followed by the name of the file you are looking for. -print
is used to instruct find
to print the full file name on the standard output, followed by a newline. (“FIND(1),” n.d.)
Some examples of find
:
mislav@mislavovo-racunalo:~/Linux_folder$ find /home -name ab -print
/home/mislav/.cache/pip/wheels/ab
/home/mislav/.npm/_cacache/index-v5/ab
/home/mislav/.npm/_cacache/index-v5/fc/ab
/home/mislav/.npm/_cacache/index-v5/31/ab
/home/mislav/.npm/_cacache/content-v2/sha512/b9/ab
/home/mislav/.npm/_cacache/content-v2/sha512/ab
/home/mislav/.npm/_cacache/content-v2/sha512/b1/ab
mislav@mislavovo-racunalo:~/Linux_folder$ find /home -name ab.txt -print
/home/mislav/Linux_folder/ab.txt
mislav@mislavovo-racunalo:~/Linux_folder$ find /home -name 'ab*' -print | grep Linux_folder
/home/mislav/Linux_folder/aba.txt~
/home/mislav/Linux_folder/ab.txt~
/home/mislav/Linux_folder/aba.txt
/home/mislav/Linux_folder/ab.txt
/home/mislav/Linux_folder/ab2.txt
I always used find
to find a particular file (such as some files I needed which relate to software development), so I never needed to use other find functionalities (and there are many). I found a good guide for functionalities of find
I didn’t cover here: (“A find Tutorial and Primer,” n.d.), although again, other than memorizing this short line at the beginning of this post and using it, I never used anything else besides that.
“What’s the difference between locate
and find
?” you may ask. Well, the astute reader (and I hate when someone writes this as I always feel bad) will have noticed that locate
operates on a database. So, if some file entry wasn’t added to the database locate
operates on, locate
won’t find it, but find
will. So find
is more powerful than locate
in the sense that it doesn’t rely on a database which can be incomplete at a given moment. I have used find
much more often than locate
.
Hope you learned something useful!
References
A find Tutorial and Primer. (n.d.). Retrieved February 6, 2020, from https://danielmiessler.com/study/find/
FIND(1). (n.d.). Retrieved February 6, 2020, from http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/find.1.html
Ward, B. (2014). How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know (2nd ed.). No Starch Press. Page 20
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