Absoulte beginner usage of 'find'

[Taxidriver]

I can't manage to find a file using the command 'find'. Can you help me with the corrent syntax?

 

[danielhozac]

What is it that you want to find?

//Daniel

 

[AP81]

find / -name file1* -print

This will find any instances of files named that begin with 'file1' or are in any subdirectories named 'file1'

find / -name '*.txt' -print

This will do the same, but seach for the file extension txt

If you want to search within a specific directory then you can use something like:

find /etc -name ....

Common tags used with the find command include -size and
-atime, to specify the file size limit and time of last access. For example:

find / -name file1* -size -50k -atime -7

This will do the same as the first example mentioned, but will limit size to 50k or less and time of creation to 7 days or less.

I am not on a Linux box at the moment and these are off the top of my head, so I cannot test them.

Post back if you are still having trouble.

 

[Taxidriver]

Ok, I managed to do that without -print.
I am using Debian, what caused me trouble was that I got long lists of paths instead of getting the desired path only. Thanks.

 

[pavNell]

If the desired path is only the / directory, no need to use find, use ls instead...

ls -1 /filename*
lists the file(s) in single column in the / directory.

ls -l /filename*
long listing of file(s).


man ls
HTH

 

[edemiere]

Well, I am old school system V, but, I have always gotten myself to where I want to search from recursively and typed:

find . -depth -name filenamehere -print

You can wildcard a name, though that will naturally give you a lot more hits.

Try that and see what it gives you, because if I recall it should only spit out the paths that have results matching your find.

Good luck!

 

[ppc386]

If you use wildcards with [tt]find[/tt], it is usually a good habit
to always put the "name" in quotes...

For instance:
[tt] % cd /usr/local/lib[/tt]

This will fail:
[tt] % find -name *.so [/tt]

But this is OK:
[tt] % find -name "*.so" [/tt]