Find file in directory from command line

find /root/directory/to/search -name 'filename.*'# Directory is optional (defaults to cwd)

Standard UNIX globbing is supported. See man find for more information.

If you're using Vim, you can use:

:e **/filename.cpp

Or :tabn or any Vim command which accepts a filename.

If you're looking to do something with a list of files, you can use find combined with the bash $() construct (better than backticks since it's allowed to nest).

for example, say you're at the top level of your project directory and you want a list of all C files starting with "btree". The command:

find . -type f -name 'btree*.c'

will return a list of them. But this doesn't really help with doing something with them.

So, let's further assume you want to search all those file for the string "ERROR" or edit them all. You can execute one of:

grep ERROR $(find . -type f -name 'btree*.c')vi $(find . -type f -name 'btree*.c')

to do this.

When I was in the UNIX world (using tcsh (sigh...)), I used to have all sorts of "find" aliases/scripts setup for searching for files. I think the default "find" syntax is a little clunky, so I used to have aliases/scripts to pipe "find . -print" into grep, which allows you to use regular expressions for searching:

# finds all .java files starting in current directoryfind . -print | grep '\.java'#finds all .java files whose name contains "Message"find . -print | grep '.*Message.*\.java'

Of course, the above examples can be done with plain-old find, but if you have a more specific search, grep can help quite a bit. This works pretty well, unless "find . -print" has too many directories to recurse through... then it gets pretty slow. (for example, you wouldn't want to do this starting in root "/")