locate filename
find -name '*filename*'
echo **/*filename*
ls -ld **/*filename*
(Read on for the main terms and conditions. Read the manual for the fine print.)
Listing the contents of a directory is kind of a secondary feature of ls
. The main job of ls
, the one that takes up most of its complexity, is fine-tuning its display. (Look at the manual and compare the number of options related to choosing what files to display vs. the number of options that control what information to display about each file and how the display is formatted. This is true both of GNU ls which you'll find on Linux, and of other systems with fewer options, since the early days.)
The default mode of ls
is that when you pass it a directory, it lists the files in that directory. If you pass it any other type of file (regular file, symbolic link, etc.), it lists just that file. (This applies to each argument separately.) The option -d
tells ls
never to descend into a directory.
ls
does have an option -R
that tells it to list directories recursively. But it's of limited applicability, and doesn't allow much filtering on the output.
The very first tool to perform pattern matching is the shell itself. You don't need any other command: just type your wildcards and you're set. This is known as globbing.
echo *filename*
Traditionally, wildcards were limited to the current directory (or the indicated directory: echo /some/where/*filename*
). A *
matches any file name, or any portion of file name, but *.txt
will not match foo/bar.txt
. Modern shells have added the pattern **/
which means “in this directory, or in any directory below it (recursively)”. With bash, for historical compatibility reasons, this feature needs to be explicitly enabled with shopt -s globstar
(you can put this line in your ~/.bashrc
).
echo **/*filename*
The echo
command just echoes the list of file names generated by the shell back at you. As an exception, if there is no matching file name at all, the wildcard pattern is left unchanged in bash (unless you set shopt -s nullglob
, in which case the pattern expands to an empty list), and zsh signals an error (unless you set setopt nullglob
, or setopt no_no_match
which causes the pattern to be left unchanged).
You may still want to use ls
for its options. For example, ls
can give indications about the nature or permissions of the file (directory, executable, etc.) through colors. You may want to display the file's date, size and ownership with ls -l
. See the manual for many more options.
The traditional command to look for a file in a directory tree is find
. It comes with many options to control which files to display and what to do with them. For example, to look for files whose name matches the pattern *filename*
in the current directory and its subdirectories and print their names:
find /some/dir -name '*filename*' -print
-print
is an action (most other actions consist of executing a command on the file); if you don't put an action, -print
is implied. Also, if you don't specify any directory to traverse (/some/dir
above), the current directory is implied. The condition -name '*filename'
says to list (or act on) only the files whose name matches that pattern; there are many other filters, such as -mtime -1
to match the files modified in the last 24 hours. You can sometimes omit the quotes on -name '*filename*'
, but only if the wildcard would not match any file in the current directory (see above). All in all, the short form is
find -name '*filename*'
Another useful tool when you know (part of) the name of a file is locate
. This tool queries a database of file names. On typical systems, it's refreshed every night. The advantage of locate
over find /
is that it's a lot faster. A downside is that its information may be stale. There are several implementations of locate
which differ in their behavior on multi-user systems: the basic locate
program indexes only publicly-readable files (you may want to run the companion updatedb
to make a second database that indexes all the files in your account); there are other versions (mlocate, slocate) that index all files and have the locate
program filter the database to only return the files you can see.
locate filename
Sometimes you think that a file is provided by a package in your distribution, you know (part of) the name of the file but not the name of your package, and you'd like to install the package. Many distributions provide a tool for that. On Ubuntu, it's apt-file search filename
. For equivalent commands on other systems, check the Pacman Rosetta.
Best Answer
The following uses
find
and would still search from the root directory down to the current directory, but would only look inside the directories on that single path:The first part of the command, up to the
-prune
, will determine whether the current pathname being examined is located in the path of$PWD
. If it's not on the way to the current directory, it is pruned from the search path.The comparison is carried out by a very short
bash
script that simply tests whether the current directory,$PWD
, matches the start of the current pathname.The bit after
-prune
simply tries to matchfoo
against the filename that is being examined.Example: Trying to find something called
bin
somewhere in the directory structure above where I'm currently at.On systems without
bash
, or where there is a faster-to-startsh
shell: