command to find files by searching only part of their names?
Finding Files with bat
Anywhere
To find all files anywhere inside /path/to/folder
whose names contain bat
, you can use:
find /path/to/folder -name '*bat*'
I have quoted the search pattern *bat*
because, if the quotes were omitted and files match *bat*
in the current directory, the shell will expand *bat*
into a list of them and pass that to find
. Then find
wouldn't work right. (\*bat\*
and "*bat*"
also work.)
To search in the folder you're currently in (e.g., that you've cd
ed to), use .
, as usual:
find . -name '*bat*'
To search your whole computer, use /
. To search your home directory, use ~
, or the full name of your home directory. (The shell expands ~
to your home directory's fully qualified path.)
Broadening or Narrowing Your Search, Based on Name
If you want to search case-insensitively, so files containing BAT
, bAt
, and so forth are matched, use the -iname
test instead of the -name
test:
find /path/to/folder -iname '*bat*'
I've noticed all your files end in .c
. If you only want to find files like that, use:
find /path/to/folder -name '*bat*.c'
I noticed all your filenames have bat
either at the very beginning or the very end of the part preceding the .c
suffix. If you want to avoid matching files like embattled.c
, you could use:
find /path/to/folder -name '*bat.c' -o -name 'bat*.c'
-o
is the or operator.
Matching Only Files
To find only regular files--and not folders, symbolic links, and special device nodes--you can use -type f
. This is frequently recommended and sometimes quite appropriate... but often not what you really want, especially if you're running find
for the purpose of examining the output yourself. If you had a symbolic link that matched your search, wouldn't you want to know about it?
If you want to find both regular files and symbolic links, you can use:
find /path/to/folder -name '*bat*' \( -type f -o -type l \)
That uses the -o
operator and also parentheses for grouping (which must be quoted so the shell does not treat them specially; otherwise you'll get a syntax error).
But suppose you only want to see symbolic links that ultimately point to a regular file (and not symbolic links to directories, device nodes, etc.). That's actually even simpler: use -xtype
instead of -type
. Provided you're not running find
with -L
flag, -xtype
on a symbolic link tests the type of the file the link points to.
find /path/to/folder -name '*bat*' -xtype f
If you have a symlink to another symlink to a file, -xtype f
will match it even though its direct target is another symlink rather than a regular file. This is almost always what you want.
Often people think they want -type f
, but really they want -xtype f
.
Getting Detailed Output
find
's default action if you don't specify one is -print
. All the commands given above are equivalent to themselves with -print
tacked on at the end.
find
is often used to run commands based on the files found--often, commands that make changes. But there are also other actions whose purpose is to display results, besides -print
. Of particular interest is -ls
:
find /path/to/folder -name '*bat*' -ls
This gives detailed information on each file, in a multi-column format, similar to (though not quite the same as) what you would see by running ls file
.
Further Reading
For more information on find
and other ways to find files, see:
- The
find
manual page, accessible online or by runningman find
in a terminal. - The GNU findutils reference manual, providing extensive documentation on the
find
,locate
, andxargs
utilities. - FindingFiles in the Ubuntu help wiki, which shows how to use find as well as several other methods.
The easiest way is to run
locate bat
This way you can search through the whole computer for files containing "bat" in the file name
To refresh the list of files on your PC run
updatedb
Run this command when you have recently added new files to your account
Open the terminal and change directories to the directory from where you want to start searching and then run this command:
find . -name "*bat*" -type f
The .
starts the find command from the current directory.
The -name
matches the string bat
and is case sensitive. (-iname
is case insensitive)
The -type f
searches for files only.