searching a file

[Debasis Mishra]

suppose in my unix login 10 folders is present. i have a abc.h header file. i forget where this header file is present. so which command i will use in unix, so that it will search from all folders.

[Sergejs Svitnevs]

please execute:
# find / -name abc.h

Regards

[Paul Cross_1]

Depending on the size of your filesystem, this command could take a long long time.

[Ivan Ferreira]

If you know that the file is in one directory below your current directoy, just use:

find . -name abc.h

To limit the search a little more. This will search in your current directory and all subdirectories.

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

locate abc.h

will provide you with all locations of abc.h file immediately, because "locate" doesn't search filesystem, but just in it's indexed database. In most distros this database is updated once a day via cron job, which runs "updatedb" utility.

[Steve_160]

"Locate" is the best way to find something, but if the files were recently created it won't know about them until the database is updated. In my system (Fedora Core 3) this happens once daily by default.

If you do have to resort to "find," use "find / -mount (filename)" to keep it from searching mounted file servers.

[Paul Cross_1]

Locate assumes that you are indexing the contents of your filesystem. I don't do this on production systems, because you take an I/O hit during the indexing process.
Fine for workstations though.

[Muthukumar_5]

Use find or locate.

find -type f -name "abc.h"

will give that. (or)

locate abc.h

--
Muthu

[Sivakumar TS]

Hi,

#find / -name abc.h -print

hope this helps.

Regards,

Siva.