find: Locate Files

grep searches inside files for text. But sometimes you are looking for the file itself: "where did I put that file called report.txt?". That is what find does.

find walks through a directory tree and lists files that match what you describe.

The basic form is: find WHERE-TO-LOOK CONDITIONS.

Find by name: -name

The most common condition is -name, to match files by their name:

find . -name report.txt

./docs/report.txt
./archive/old/report.txt

. means "start from here". find searches that folder and every sub-folder inside it, and prints the path of every match.

Wildcards

The * symbol matches "any characters". Wrap the pattern in quotes so the shell does not expand it first:

find . -name "*.log"

This finds every file ending in .log, anywhere in the tree.

Where to search

You can point find at any folder, not just .:

find logs -name "error.txt"

find is your tool for "I know the name, not the location".

Mission: Locate and Secure the Classified File

Intelligence reports that a classified document called secret.txt is stored somewhere in your home directory tree, but no one remembers the exact path. Once located, it must be secured.

1. Search the whole tree for the file named secret.txt and print its full path.
2. Search the tree again for every file ending in .log, using a wildcard.
3. Now that you know where it lives, create a folder called vault-copy and copy the classified file data/vault/secret.txt into it as secret-backup.txt.

Expected result

The path to secret.txt appears, then the .log files, and the vault-copy folder holds a secured backup of the classified file.