Ubuntu how to find file

Ubuntu Documentation

If you have ever lost a file or need to find one, searching manually can be frustrating. Here are some ways to use Ubuntu to do your searching for you.

Graphically

If you need to search for a file on the computer, there is an easy and built-in way to do it. Launch the Search for Files program from the Places menu. By default, this will only search your files (your home directory), but you can tell it to search in other folders with the Look in folder dropdown. This will only search on file names. If you want to search inside file, see the next section on Beagle.

Thunar (File Manager for Xubuntu)

In Xubuntu 7.10, Thunar is not initially set up with a file-searcher. There are a number of file-searchers that can be set up, but I will explain how to set up the gnome-search-tool.

1. Install ‘gnome-utils’ using Synaptic Package Manager

You will now be able to tick on any directory in the right pane, and choose ‘Search for Files’. This file-searcher has many different options for doing advanced searches.

Tracker

Tracker is an indexing system. It will keep track of all your files and their contents and allow you to quickly find files on your computer. For more information see Tracker.

Beagle

Beagle is also indexing system, designed to help you search inside your files. It is not installed by default. For more information on installation, see Beagle.

Recoll

Beagle is also indexing system. It is a full text search package based on a very strong backend (Xapian), for which it provides an easy to use and feature-rich interface. It is not installed by default. For more information on installation, see Recoll.

Command Line

There are a number of command line tools to help you find a file on system.

apt-file

The first method is for finding files that are (or should be) provided by Ubuntu’s packages. If you’re not familiar with the file being complained about, odds are good that it falls into this category. The apt packaging system is aware of almost all the files it provides and can be queried to learn what package provides a given file and where that file is (or should be). To take advantage of this feature, install the package apt-file and then run apt-file update in a terminal.

Maybe you suspect that the file in question is supposed to be provided by the same package you’re working with.

will show you a list of files provided by that package. For example, you’ve just installed kxdocker_0.32-1_i386.deb and your first guess, «kxdocker», doesn’t run the program.

Well it’s in there somewhere:

Sometimes you might want to find out which package provides a certain file.

will show you the package. For example,

tells you that gnome-keybinding-properties is provided by the package gnome-control-center.

The Unix command «find» is quite powerful, and if you know how to use it you can find pretty well anything. The basic syntax is «find

«. Options include criteria for your search, actions to take on files found, etc. I’ll give you a couple of examples then point you to the man page for detailed usage and more interesting examples.

You want to find every file in

/mydir/*.htm which really don’t come close. The correct solution is

» will add the execute bit to every file and directory in

where «-type d» of course means directories.

Finally, you want to make a playlist out of all the mp3 and ogg files in your home directory.

locate

every night at 4:02am, excluding /mnt/data and /mnt/files, which are remote Samba mounts that I prefer not to index. So as long as my resume is on one of my local mounted filesystems, I should be able to find it.

which and whereis

Gnome, KDE etc. have numerous utilities for finding files, and their usage is left as an exercise for the reader. Learn how to use these commands effectively and I predict you’ll forget those graphical utilities ever existed.

FindingFiles (последним исправлял пользователь gckarakostas 2015-01-20 16:16:47)

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How to Find File in Ubuntu [Ubuntu search file]

Most of the time we download some files from the web but forget the location, So this article brings up with the solution of how to find file in Ubuntu/Ubuntu search file command, which will increase your productivity level.

List of content you will read in this article:

A very common problem we all faced while working with our system [Laptop and PC], we are not able to find files that we have saved previously or downloaded from somewhere else. While there are a lot of function or features available in Linux OS that allows you to find those files. But sometimes you only have to access them with a Linux terminal, For the same, this post will be going to help you with find file in ubuntu.

The most popular open-source Linux operating system is the LTS(Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu 20.04. The operating system has earned a lot of fame and appreciation in the Linux community. The latest version is different in terms of graphics and visual design performance levels. The theme is totally different from the previous version.

There are three different variants available:

In this article, you will learn how to find file in Ubuntu 20.04 release.

How to find file in Ubunutu using GUI? [Graphical User Interface]

Ubuntu has greatly improved the graphical search feature to provide you with accurate file search results. An efficient search screen provides the relevant output of your Linux commands. This method has made search file in Ubuntu process more quick and easy to use.

To start the process of looking for the file of your choice,

Step 1: Click on Activities, Check the screenshot attached.

Step 2: There will be a search bar at the top of the screen. Check the screenshot attached.

Step 3: Then you can Enter the name of:

If you type the word “them.” The result would be as follows:

If you watch carefully, you will see that all the different files are classified into various categories. These categories are based on the extension or file type. Narrow down the search and look for the file of your anticipated category.

Step 4: If you want to narrow down your search result, open the settings and click on search.

This feature allows you to choose a specific category. You get the liberty to switch on or off the particular category of your choice. You can even shuffle their places by dragging them up or down in the list.

If you are not looking for an application or a setting, but for a saved file on the computer, then the best way to find it is to go to the File menu. In this way, you narrow down your search and make things easier for you to look for among the long list.

If your saved file is the same as some application or setting, then it will confuse you and make it even harder to find.

If you have some notion about the file which you are looking for is saved in some folder. Go on that particular folder and search file in ubuntu manually.

If you find difficulty in finding your file, go on the search icon menu to toggle the view of the folder you have opened.

When you click on the downward arrow, another window will open. This short window has the option to narrow down your search input further to make things easier for you.

You can write any specific information you remember about the file. You can also find file in ubuntu according to the date. If you don’t remember the file’s date, you can go for some keywords or extensions.

The “What” filter allows you to specify the type of the file.

You can further categorize the search by using these extended options.

Okay, that makes life so much easier! But what if you’re using Ubuntu VPS without a GUI? We got you covered.

Ubuntu Find File Using the Command Line

1: Find Command in ubuntu

This is a flexible and most productive command. It helps the users to search various files according to the date, file size, etc.

After connecting to ssh, you can start the search for files in Ubuntu server using the following syntax:

To find a specific file by name, enter the following command into the terminal:

If you are looking for a file name sample.py. You can use the following command to look for the file:

The command line allows the users to search using some content or data inside the file.

When you have forgotten the file name, it becomes so hard to find it on Windows operating system because if you cannot type the file name or letters in the search bar, you will not find anything.

But here, things are entirely different. If you have forgotten the name of the file and you know something written in the file. You can find that file by using these simple commands:

If you are looking for a file in which you remember only one word. Let’s suppose you are looking for a file, and you remember only one word hello in it. The input and output will be as follows.

To search for files based on date, there are three different options:

The above refers to any file that was modified. You can even search file in ubuntu according to the days of modification.

The above refers to any file that was accessed recently. The last time when you have accessed the file, you can also use that information to search for the file.

The above command can be used to find file in ubuntu changed within the last number of days.

Suppose that you changed the contents two days ago. The command for this would be:

2: Locate Command in Ubuntu

This command has fewer features as compared to the find command. But still, this command is useful in finding files for several different reasons.

It is relatively easy to find files with the Locate command. Run the following command:

For the file name sample.py, enter the following command into the terminal:

You can also look for multiple files:

Use the following command:

Find all files with the name sample.py and hello.py:

Conclusion

By using these techniques you can easily find file in Ubuntu.

Is it easier to search file in Ubuntu 20.04?

The answer is yes. Using the above-mentioned methods, you can find file in ubuntu saved on your computer through the GUI or by using the command line. Try the mentioned ways and let us know how it worked for you.

If you think. there are any other methods that we have to add inside the article comment down them via the comment box list below.

Ubuntu Documentation

The GNU find command searches files within a directory and its subdirectories according to several criteria such as name, size and time of last read/write. By default find prints the name of the located files but it can also perform commands on these files.

The GNU find command is part of the GNU findutils and is installed on every Ubuntu system. findutils is actually made up of 4 utilities:

This wiki page will be only be dealing with find while also briefly mentioning xargs. Hopefully locate and updatedb will be covered on their own page in the near future. «find», like «locate», can find database-files as well, but «locate» is more specialized for this task. You would run updatedb before using locate, which relies on the data produced by «updateDB».

The Basics

will find this file below the home directory. find works incredibly fast on the second run! You can search the whole / root-dir-tree in a mere approx. 3 seconds (on second run, when cache is effective) on a 500 GB ext4-fs hard disk.

The syntax for using find is:

The option [expression] refers to one or a series of options which effect the overall option of the find command. These options can involve a search by name, by size, by access time or can also involve actions taken upon these files.

Locating Files by Name

The most common use of find is in the search for a specific file by use of its name. The following command searches the home directory and all of its subdirectories looking for the file mysong.ogg:

It is important to get into the habit of quoting patterns in your search as seen above or your search results can be a little unpredictable. Such a search can be much more sophisticated though. For example if you wished to search for all of the ogg files in your home directory, some of which you think might be named ‘OGG’ rather than ‘ogg’, you would run:

Here the option ‘-iname’ performs a case-insensitive search while the wildcard character ‘*’ matches any character, or number of characters, or zero characters. To perform the same search on your entire drive you would run:

This could be a slow search depending on the number of directories, sub-directories and files on your system. This highlights an important difference in the way that find operates in that it examines the system directly each time unlike programs like locate or slocate which actually examine a regularly updated database of filnames and locations.

Locating Files by Size

Another possible search is to search for files by size. To demonstrate this we can again search the home directory for Ogg Vorbis files but this time looking for those that are 100 megabytes or larger:

Are you starting to see the power of find, and the thought involved in constructing a focused search? If you are interested there is more discussion of these combined searches in the Advanced Usage section below.

Locating Files by Access Time

The syntax works from left to right and by default find joins the 2 expressions with an implied «and». This is dealt with in more depth in the section below entitled «Combining Searches».

Advanced Usage

The sections above detail the most common usage of find and this would be enough for most searches. However there are many more possibilities in the usage of find for quite advanced searches and this sections discusses a few of these possibilities.

Combining Searches

It is possible to combine searches when using find with the use of what is known in the find man pages as operators. These are

The classic example is the use of a logical AND syntax:

This performs the same search as before but will look for ogg files that are not greater than 20 megabytes. It is possible also to use a logical OR in your find search:

Acting On The files

Using xargs

xargs feeds here-string / as parameter («argument») to the ls command

When using a really complex search it is often a good idea to use another member of the findutils package: xargs. Without its use the message Argument list too long could be seen signalling that the kernel limit on the combined length of a commandline and its environment variables has been exceeded. xargs works by feeding the results of the search to the subsequent command in batches calculated on the system capabilities (based on ARG_MAX). An example:

More Information

Linux Tutorial: The Power of the Linux Find Command The amazing Nixie Pixel gives a video demonstration of find.

find (последним исправлял пользователь mail77 2015-02-24 00:21:33)

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Find a file by name using command-line

I would like to determine the location of a file using command-line. I have tried:

to no avail. What is the command to determine the file’s directory, provided its name?

8 Answers 8

/ will search your entire home directory (likely where you downloaded it to). If you used wget as root, its possible it could be somewhere else so you could use / to search the whole filesystem.

Your syntax for locate is correct, but you may have to run

first. For whatever reason, I never have good luck with locate though.

The other answers are good, but I find omitting Permission denied statements gives me clearer answers (omits stderr s due to not running sudo ):

An alternative is:

This way returns results if the search-term matches anywhere in the complete file path, e.g. /home/postgis-2.0.0/docs/Readme.txt

find is one of the most useful Linux/Unix tools.

where you can change ‘.'(look into the Current Directory) to ‘/'(look into the entire system) or ‘

/'(look into the Home Directory).

where you can change «-name» to «-iname» if you want no case sensitive.

where you can change «file_name«(a file that can start and end with whatever it is) to the exactly name of the file.

This should simplify the locating of file:

This would give you the full path to the file

While find command is simplest way to recursively traverse the directory tree, there are other ways and in particular the two scripting languages that come with Ubuntu by default already have the ability to do so.

Perl has Find module, which allows to perform recursive traversal of directory tree, and via subroutine perform specific action on them. With a small script, you can traverse directory tree, push files that contain the desired string into array, and then print it like so:

How to search entire hard drive for a file?

Trying to locate a file, how can I search the entire hard drive for a file?

9 Answers 9

You could also use locate to look for commands. Why do people use locate if find does the job? Because locate is much faster than find since it just searches through database(s) of indexed locations to find your file/regex.

locate some-file.avi searches through database(s) of almost every file on the disk for a file called «some-file.avi».

man locate for more info on the file.

You might need to run updatedb first to ensure the index database is up to date, otherwise, ‘locate’ might not return what you are looking for.

Start by clicking the «Home Folder» icon in the launcher.

In the window that opens, click «Search».

Type what you want to search for in the box, then press enter.

Under the dropdown for location, choose your hard drive, then click reload.

The results will then be displayed. Hope that helps!

If you’re looking for a string inside a file, you can use grep. Here’s a sample command:

On Ubuntu, i know that everyone wants to be dogmatic about using command line all the time, and I have in the past been that way, but I love the Gnome «Search for files. » tool. I think its awesome.

For a Desktop setup, Install «gnome-search-tool»
sudo apt-get install gnome-search-tool

Don’t install this in a server, it will also install the ubuntu desktop package.
Thanks to @Rinzwind for pointing that out.