What are the commands to find files in Linux?

Linux commands to find files: 1. The find command can find any desired file; 2. The locate command cannot find the latest changed files; 3. The whereis command only searches binary files and man files. Description files and source code files; 4. which command; 5. type command.

#The operating environment of this tutorial: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 system, Dell G3 computer.

When using a computer, you often need to find files. In Linux, there are many ways to do this. Here are five commands summarized for you.

1. find

find is the most common and powerful search command. You can use it to find any file you want to find. .

The usage format of find is as follows:

$ find <指定目录> <指定条件> <指定动作>

　- : The directory to be searched and all its subdirectories. Defaults to the current directory.

　- : Characteristics of the files to be searched.

　- : Perform specific processing on the search results.

If no parameters are added, find will search the current directory and its subdirectories by default, and will not filter any results (that is, return all files) and display them all on the screen.

Usage examples of find:

　　$ find . -name 'my*'

Search for all files in the current directory (including subdirectories, the same below) whose file names begin with my.

　　$ find . -name 'my*' -ls

Search for all files in the current directory whose file names begin with my and display their detailed information.

　　$ find . -type f -mmin -10

Search in the current directory for all ordinary files that have been updated in the past 10 minutes. If the -type f parameter is not added, ordinary files and special files directories are searched.

2. locate

The locate command is actually another way of writing "find -name", but it is much faster than the latter. , the reason is that it does not search a specific directory, but a database (/var/lib/locatedb), which contains all local file information. The Linux system automatically creates this database and automatically updates it once a day, so the latest changed files cannot be found using the locate command. To avoid this situation, you can use the updatedb command to manually update the database before using locate.

Usage examples of the locate command:

　　$ locate /etc/sh

Search for all files starting with sh in the etc directory.

　　$ locate ~/m

Search for all files starting with m in the user's home directory.

　　$ locate -i ~/m

Search for all files starting with m in the user's home directory, ignoring case.

3. whereis

The whereis command can only be used to search for program names, and only searches for binary files (parameter -b), man Description files (parameter -m) and source code files (parameter -s). If parameters are omitted, all information is returned.

Usage examples of whereis command:

　　$ whereis grep

4. which

which command is used to In the path specified by the PATH variable, search for the location of a system command and return the first search result. In other words, using the which command, you can see whether a certain system command exists and where the command is executed. Examples of using the

which command:

　　$ which grep

5. The type

type command is not actually a search command, it is Used to distinguish whether a command comes with the shell or is provided by an independent binary file outside the shell. If a command is an external command, then using the -p parameter will display the path of the command, which is equivalent to the which command.

Usage examples of type command:

　　$ type cd

The system will prompt that cd is the shell’s built-in command (build-in).

　　$ type grep

The system will prompt that grep is an external command and display the path of the command.

　　$ type -p grep

After adding the -p parameter, it is equivalent to the which command.

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