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Parameters can be combined, for example if I am looking for all symbolic links whose filenames are ending with “.service” (to isolate all systemd services for example), I would run the following command. $ find -type įor example, if we search for all the symbolic links on the host, we would issue the following command.
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Knowing all those file types, you are now able to search for files by file type with the find command.
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c : character devices (serial ports, sound cards).b : block devices (such as a hard drive for example).Here is a recap of all the file types used on Linux. Find files using find by filetypeĪs we previously discussed in our article on hard and soft links, files are assigned file types and it is used as a way to differentiate them. I redirected the error output to /dev/null using output redirection to avoid error messages on the console.
#Find any file in linux how to#
The main difference between find and locate when it comes to searching for files is that find will lookup for filenames while locate will look for paths to the file.įor example, if we go back to the runlevel example we used before, here’s how to look for runlevel files using the find command. The most common usage of the find function is to locate files given their filenames. Here are all the possibilities of the find function on Linux. Remember that for the grEP is Expression Path, and find is the opposite, so Path Expression!įind is a pretty powerful command as it has way more options than the locate command. Quick tip : do you have some trouble remembering if path or expression comes first? Join the nixCraft community via RSS Feed, Email Newsletter or follow on Twitter.The first way to find and locate files on a Linux host is to use the find command.īy default, the find command is available on all distributions and it has the following syntax $ find He wrote more than 7k+ posts and helped numerous readers to master IT topics. Vivek Gite is the founder of nixCraft, the oldest running blog about Linux and open source. I suggest that you read the man page of find online here or by typing the man command at the shell prompt: You also learned the how to search the entire hard drive for a file when using Linux with the help of find command.
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You just learned how to locate a file using locate command.
#Find any file in linux update#
Please note that the updatedb command is usually run daily by cron to update the default database. The updatedb command creates or updates a database used by locate command. If you do not get any output run the updatedb command as root user: ignore case distinctions when matching patterns, run: You can find files by name using the locate command. Using locate command to find a file on my system For example, ‘backup.txt’ will match BACKUP.txt, backup.txt, BackUp.Txt and so on.