Finding Stuff on Linux Systems

How to Find Stuff on Linux

This is a placeholder for a future linux article. The article is sketched out and published as "hidden" for now to make it accessable...

There are a number of ways to find things on linux, including; locate, find, and grep.

'used to quickly find files by their name.

... 'relies on a database that contains a snapshot of all files and directories on your system (updated roughly daily by chron-job).

locate myfile.txt

-r Use regex.

Find files within a specified directory and its subdirectories based on various criteria.

find [path] [expression]

find . -name "*texture*"

grep is a VASTLY powerful command-line utility in Linux and Unix-like systems used to search for patterns within text data.

grep [options] pattern [file(s)]

Can be used to find files containing target patters. For example, find files containing the word 'texture' ...

1. grep -E -r ".*[Tt]exture\s*" .

2. grep -Erl ".*[Tt]exture\s*" . | xargs grep -l ".*[Nn]oise\s*"

Where -E flags the use of extended regular expressions.

To be cont'd ...