Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.
- Create BookmarkCreate Bookmark
- Create Note or TagCreate Note or Tag
- DownloadDownload
- PrintPrint
III. Common Tasks and Essential Tools > 17. Searching for Files
As we have wandered around our Linux system, one thing has become abundantly clear: A typical Linux system has a lot of files! This raises the question “How do we find things?” We already know that the Linux filesystem is well organized according to conventions that have been passed down from one generation of Unix-like systems to the next, but the sheer number of files can present a daunting problem.
In this chapter, we will look at two tools that are used to find files on a system:
-
locate—Find files by name. -
find—Search for files in a directory hierarchy.
We will also look at a command that is often used with file-search commands to process the resulting list of files:
-
xargs—Build and execute command lines from standard input.
