How to Find a Specific File from a Linux Terminal

How can I find a specific file from a Linux terminal?

Find from root path find / -name "index.html"

Find from current path find . -name "index.html"

How to find all files containing specific text (string) on Linux

Do the following:

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'

-r or -R is recursive,
-n is line number, and
-w stands for match the whole word.
-l (lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.
-e is the pattern used during the search

Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:

This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:

grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:

grep --exclude=\*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

For directories it's possible to exclude one or more directories using the --exclude-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:

grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.

For more options, see man grep.

Find specific files in a directory through linux terminal

use find. Specify path to your x directory, specify that you want to find only files (type-f) and list several masks for files you want with -name:

find /path/to/x_directory -type f -name "*y*" -name "*z*"

How to search for a file in the CentOS command line

Try this command:

find / -name file.look

How can I find a file/directory that could be anywhere on linux command line?

"Unfortunately this seems to only check the current directory, not the entire folder". Presumably you mean it doesn't look in subdirectories. To fix this, use find -name "filename"

If the file in question is not in the current working directory, you can search your entire machine via

find / -name "filename"

This also works with stuff like find / -name "*.pdf", etc. Sometimes I like to pipe that into a grep statement as well (since, on my machine at least, it highlights the results), so I end up with something like

find / -name "*star*wars*" | grep star

Doing this or a similar method just helps me instantly find the filename and recognize if it is in fact the file I am looking for.

How to search for a text in specific files in unix

It might be better to use find, since grep's include/exclude can get a bit confusing:

find -type f -name "*.xml" -exec grep -l 'hello' {} +

This looks for files whose name finishes with .xml and performs a grep 'hello' on them. With -l (L) we make the file name to be printed, without the matched line.

Explanation

find -type f this finds files in the given directory structure.
-name "*.xml" selects those files whose name finishes with .xml.
-exec execute a command on every result of the find command.
-exec grep -l 'hello' {} + execute grep -l 'hello' on the given file. With {} + we are refering to the matched name (it is like doing grep 'hello' file but refering to the name of the file provided by the find command). Also, grep -l (L) returns the file name, not the match itself.

Linux terminal: Recursive search for string only in files w given file extension; display file name and absolute path

According to the grep manual, you can do this using the --include option (combined with the -l option if you want only the name — I usually use -n to show line numbers):

--include=glob
Search only files whose name matches glob, using wildcard matching as described under --exclude.
-l
--files-with-matches
Suppress normal output; instead print the name of each input file from which output would normally have been printed. The scanning of each file stops on the first match. (-l is specified by POSIX.)

A suitable glob would be "*.doc" (ensure that it is quoted, to allow the shell to pass it to grep).

GNU grep also has a recursive option -r (not in POSIX grep). Together with the globbing, you can search a directory-tree of ".doc" files like this:

grep -r -l --include="*.doc" "mystring" .

If you wanted to make this portable, then find is the place to start. But using grep's extension makes searches much faster, and is available on any Linux platform.