How do I search for a particular file?

[Joshua Goi]

Hi,

How do I search for a particular file using the find command? Say I want to find every file that ends with bsm (*bsm). How do I do that?

[Jeff_Traigle]

find / -name *bsm

Assuming you want to start frm the root directory.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

find . -name '*bsm'

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

use,

find / -name *bsm -print

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Geoff Wild]

As others have said:

find / -name *bsm -print

man find
will give you some good examples.

Rgds...Geoff

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Actually, it is very important that you enclose thwe wildcard pattern in quotes (e.g. -name '*bsm') so that the find command rather than the shell expands the argument. -name expects exactly one argument. If you have multiple files that end with bsm in the current directorty, -name *bsm will see multiple arguments and lead a find parse failure but -name '*bsm' will supply exactly one argument. The -print is implicit but you can supply it, if you like. All that is really necessary (starting from the current directory, . ) is find . -name '*bsm'

[Kent Ostby]

If you want to find them also do an ll on them, you would do:

find . -name '*bsm' -exec ll {} \;

Best regards,

Kent M. Ostby

[SANTOSH S. MHASKAR]

$ find / -name "*bsm"

-Santosh

[Jeroen Peereboom]

In addition to the other replies:
- Quotes are indeed essential ('*bsm' or '*.bsm').
- Since find is not really a fast command you may want to schedule a daily / weekly cron job to 'find' all local files for you (not the cd, not nfs) and put this list in a file 'allfiles'. Next time you want a file you just do a grep '*.bsm' allfiles.

JP.

[Joshua Goi]

Thanks people for the help.