Looking for Files with Particular Names (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition)

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9.4. Looking for Files with Particular Names

You can look for particular files by using an expression with wildcards (Section 28.3) as an argument to the -name operator. Because the shell also interprets wildcards, it is necessary to quote them so they are passed to find unchanged. Any kind of quoting can be used:

% find . -name \*.o -print
% find . -name '*.o' -print
% find . -name "[a-zA-Z]*.o" -print

Any directory along the path to the file is not matched with the -name operator, merely the name at the end of the path. For example, the previous commands would not match the pathname ./subdir.o/afile -- but they would match ./subdir.o and ./src/subdir/prog.o.

Section 9.27 shows a way to match directories in the middle of a path. Here's a simpler "find file" alias that can come in very handy:

alias ff "find . -name '*\!{*}*' -ls"

Give it a file or directory name; the alias will give a long listing of any file or directory names that contain the argument. For example:

% ff ch09
2796156 4 -rw-r--r--  1 deb  deb  628 Feb  2 10:41 ./oreilly/UPT/book/ch09.sgm

--BB and JP


9.3. Don't Forget -print		9.5. Searching for Old Files