This is especially true if you are running Linux without a graphical user interface and need to rely on the command line. If you want to limit access to files, you’ll want to list the users on Linux first.When you have to find a file in Linux, it’s sometimes not as easy as finding a file in another operating system. Now that you know how to search file a file in Linux, it might be useful to know how to use SCP to transfer the file to another machine. ![]() Whether you’re new to the Linux operating system or you’ve been running it for years, you can always brush up your skills. What you don’t have with this option is the ability to run other commands quickly on your search results. This GUI tool does allow you to filter by file type and when the file was last accessed or modified. Just click the folder icon in the Dock, then the magnifying glass. In Ubuntu, you can search for specific files using the Files application. Many GUI file managers for Linux will also support searches. How to Search for a File in Linux Using the GUI To really make the most of find, it’s crucial to read the manual entry for the command. Using the -ok flag, find will prompt you before taking any action on the files matching your search parameters If you’d rather see prompts before the second command does anything, replace the options with -ok or -okdir, respectively. If you prefer to run your additional command from the directory containing the matching file, use -execdir instead.īy default, -exec and -execdir will continue to run uninterrupted on their own. Keep in mind, -exec will run from the root directory of your Linux installation. It would change the permissions for each of those files to give the file owner read permissions ( chmod o+r). Issued by the root user in the /etc directory, the above command would search for all files named rc.conf. The tool for this is the tried and true grep command. However, it’s possible to dig even deeper and use another Linux command to search files based on what they contain. Used on its own, find will only filter your files and directories based on file names and metadata. Using Grep to Locate Files Based on Content -mtime X: returns only those files modified in the previous X days.-not: only produces results that don’t match the specified test case.-iname: searches files, ignoring capitalization.-maxdepth X: searches the specified directory and its subdirectories, to a maximum depth of X.You can change more of the default behaviors using these parameters: The third choice, -O3, automatically reorders the search based on efficient use of resources and likelihood of returning relevant results. If you pass the -O2 flag, find filters based on the file name, then file type. This flag would be -O1, but there’s really no reason to include it. By default, find filters the search results according to file name first, before running any other tests. This execution returns all files in the given directory modified within the past 11 days Useful Options and Optimizations for Finding Linux FilesĪdditional flags can control what order find applies its search tests. db get listed, ignoring text case, but only if the files have been modified within the past 6 days by a user named randomperson. find /home -user randomperson -mtime 6 -iname "*.db" Let’s look at one more basic example, that will return files changed in the preceding 6 days. The key here is the -type and -empty parameters, used instead of the -name flag in previous examples. The following command would do just that: find. Now, let’s say you wanted to identify all empty files in a directory. In the above example, the command would list all HTML files in the /var/www directory tree. ![]() However, the following command will follow those links: find -O3 -L /var/www/ -name “*.html” ![]() Following Symbolic Linksīy default, the find command will ignore symbolic links. There’s much more that can be done with the command, though. That command would search my home directory for all files ending in. The basic usage of find looks like the following: find /home/jeff -name “*.jpg” Executed the right way, find can even look inside your files to identify particular text strings, and you can narrow your search to those files modified recently. The UNIX command find can very easily locate any type of file you might be looking for. Just as Windows has a find command, so does Linux. The most powerful method of searching for files on Linux is by using the command line. How to Search For a File in Linux From the Command Line How do you search for a file in Linux? As it turns out, the operating system has some very powerful built-in tools for making file searches.
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