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

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