Wed 13 Sep 2006
There are basically two ways to search for files in Linux.
The first is locate <filename> which will search the whole file system.
The second way is using find. The simplest way to use this is find <start directory> -name <file to search for>. For case insensitive searches use -iname. You can also pass the output of the file to another command as follows:
$ find / - name ‘starttxt*’ -exec command {\}\ \;
This command would find all the files on your system that begin with the letters ‘starttxt’ and would then execute the command on those files.
The words following the -exec option are the command that you want to execute eg.. ls -l {\}\ is basically an indicator that the filenames returned by the search should be substituted here. \; is the terminating string, and is required at the end of the command
which can be used to output the full path of executables.
Try Edinburgh University‘s website if you are after the man files
