Small, Sharp Software Tools

Finding Files

Sometimes you just don’t know where to look for a file. Maybe you’ve misplaced it, or maybe you’re like me and you save everything you’ve ever done and have lost track of the file several months ago. GUI interfaces usually have some tool that can search through your disk and find files. A tool on the CLI does that too, and it’s the appropriately named find command.

With find, you can locate files by name, last modified date, or even by the content they contain.

In ​Creating and Reading Files​, you created a file named greetings.txt in the ~/Desktop directory. Let’s use the find command to look for that file in the Desktop folder:

$ find ~/Desktop -name "greetings.txt"
/home/brian/Desktop/greetings.txt

The find ...