Linux Shortcuts and Commands
Part 5 of the Linux Newbie Administrator Guide
5.7 Finding files
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find / -name
"filename"
Find the file called "filename" on your filesystem starting the search from
the root directory "/". The "filename" may contain wildcards (*,?).
The
find command is very powerful. It has many options that will let you search
for files in a variety of ways e.g., by date, size, permissions, owner,
.... Yet some search queries can take you more than a minute to compose.
See info find. Here are some more complex examples for using
find to accomplish some useful tasks.
find
$HOME -name core -exec rm -f {} \;
The above command finds files named "core", starting from your home directory.
For each such file found, it perform the action "rm -f" (force-deleting
the file). The {} stands for the file found, and the "\" terminates
the command list.
find
/dev -user "peter" |more
The above command prints the filename for all devices owned by user
"peter". Printing the filename is the default "action" of find, so it
does not have to be specified if this is all I need.
find
/home/peter -nouser -exec ls -l {} \; -ok chown peter.peter {} \;
Find files without a valid owner in the /home/peter directory. List
the file in a long format. Then prompt to change the ownership to the
user "peter" and the group "peter". You probably need to be root to
hand over the ownership of a file.
locate filename
Find the file name which contains the string "filename". Easier and faster
than the previous command but depends on a database that normally rebuilds
at night, so you cannot find a file that was just saved to the filesystem.
To force the immediate update of the database, I may do (as root): updatedb&.
which
executable_name
Show me the full path to the executable that would run if I just typed
its name on the command line. For example, this commmand:
which mozilla
on my system produces:
/usr/bin/mozilla
whereis
command
Print the locations for the binary, source, and manual page files of the
command "command".
rgrep
-r 'celeste' . |more
grep -r 'celeste' . |more
(Two commands, use the one that works on your system.) Search all files
in the current directory and all its subdirectories (the option "-r" stands
for "recursive") for the example string "celeste". Print the filename
and the line in the file that contains the searched string.
kfind
&
(in X terminal). A GUI front-end to find and grep. Very
nice. The & at the end of the command makes kfind run
in the background so that the X terminal remains available.
Next > 5.8 Basics of
X-windows
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