The find command recursively descends the directory tree for each path provided, evaluating an expression. It is mainly used to search files and directories on Linux and Unix-like systems. The syntax is as follows to search files according to given criteria. You can search for files by name, owner, group, type, permissions, date, and other criteria:
find dir-to-look criteria what-to-do
OR
find [options] dir-to-look criteria what-to-do
In this example, search your $HOME for a file called hello.c:
find $HOME -name "hello.c" -print |
This will search the whole $HOME (i.e. /home/username/) system for any files named “hello.c” and display their pathnames:
/Users/vivek/Downloads/hello.c /Users/vivek/hello.c
However, it will not match HELLO.C or HellO.C. To match is case insensitive pass the -iname option as follows:
find $HOME -iname "hello.c" -print |
Sample outputs:
/Users/vivek/Downloads/hello.c /Users/vivek/Downloads/Y/Hello.C /Users/vivek/Downloads/Z/HELLO.c /Users/vivek/hello.c
Finally, pass the -type f option to only search for files:
find /dir/to/search -type f -iname "fooBar.conf.sample" -print find $HOME -type f -iname "fooBar.conf.sample" -print |
A note about AIX/HP-UX and other old Unix-like systems
The -iname works either on GNU or BSD (including OS X) version find command. If your version of find command does not supports -iname, try the following syntax using grep command:
find $HOME | grep -i "hello.c" find $HOME -name "*" -print | grep -i "hello.c" |
OR try
find $HOME -name '[hH][eE][lL][lL][oO].[cC]' -print |
Sample outputs:
/Users/vivek/Downloads/Z/HELLO.C /Users/vivek/Downloads/Z/HEllO.c /Users/vivek/Downloads/hello.c /Users/vivek/hello.c
See also
- Solaris UNIX Case-Insensitive Find File Search
- See all find command examples from our /faq/ sections.
- Man pages – find(1),grep(1)
2 comment
the locate command fines file on a system. adding -i has it ignore case
locate -i hello.c
However it will also find directories with the same name that can produce a long for something like “hello” to prevent this use something like this
locate -ir /hello.c$
That will locate a the exact but case insensitive filename “hello.c”
Thanks. Very useful. I also found that with the locate command, you can add a parameter -i to ignore case