How can I recursively find all files in current and subfolders based on wildcard matching?

Question

How can I recursively find all files in current and subfolders based on wildcard matching?

See

Answer 1

Use find:

find . -name "foo*"

find needs a starting point, so the . (dot) points to the current directory.

If you need case insensitive search use :

find . -iname "foo*"

Tempietempla

I know this is tagged as linux but this is worth mentioning: the path is required for on other *nix variants that aren't linux. On linux, the path is optional if you want to use dot. – Natalianatalie

@Seatter "foo*" tells find to look for all files that start with "foo". It is just his example. You could use "gpio*" to find all files who's names start with gpio, or just "gpio1" to find all files named gpio1. – Everara

* is a wildcard - more wildcard possibilities here: tldp.org/LDP/GNU-Linux-Tools-Summary/html/x11655.htm – Bogie

note that the "foo*" is in quotes so the shell doesn't expand it before passing it to find. if you just did find . foo*, the foo* would be expanded AND THEN passed to find. – Melaniemelanin

use -iname for case insensitive – Ploughshare

I have a file test.xml in the subdirectory of my current working directory and I have used the command find . -name "test*". It doesnt work. – Lingwood

For some reason it doesn't work when put in a sh script. Does it need bash or something? – Goodall

Worth stressing that " " is very necessary for recursive searching. – Retroactive

Also useful: If you don't want to be notified about directories you don't have permission to (or other errors), you can do find . -name "foo*" 2>/dev/null – Pompon

If you wish to ignore case (as in most cases when I use this) then you could do: find . -iname "foo*" – Quetzalcoatl

In reponse to @IslandCow's comment: that's not true (at least not everywhere). I have to use '.' explicitly on my Fedora boxes. – Chiro

@Retroactive Can you explain why the " " is needed? What is "expansion" and why is that bad? – Nosology

@KolobCanyon you can check the man page of find, or this link and search the word "non-bug" and then "quote", there you have more info. Also, check this. Generally, * expansion is "iterate current dir and substitute the * with every file name". So, to avoid this, we use quotes. – Retroactive

@Retroactive Is that different than string interpolation? Because I thought quotes meant string interpolation in the shell – Nosology

@KolobCanyon something like that, but the links have more and I think expansion is broader. – Retroactive

This is ridiculous... what if I only want to search in the current dir?? – Minacious

@yan king yin - use ls? – Malefaction

weirdly enough this doesn't work me. What worked for me is the answer from Paul Whipp – Meed

If I leave out the quotes, it searches only in the current directory. The genius designer of this should explain the behavior. – Minacious

dot does not work for me, I have to use find /some/path/ -iname "foo*" – Truism

note that sometime subdirectories are sym-linked, and to traverse those you need to include -L option – Ducat

ag -g <pattern> / is better (because multi threading). – Wondrous

If you want only files without the directories, use -type f – Parlay

It seems that this does not work when I am looking for wildcard expanding in the full path name. Say I am looking for files such that the full path matches string1*string2*, for example /home/string1bla/string2.txt, how would I do this? – Achondrite

To answer my own question above. Use the -path option, see superuser.com/a/400086/728074. – Achondrite

Answer 2

Piping find into grep is often more convenient; it gives you the full power of regular expressions for arbitrary wildcard matching.

For example, to find all files with case insensitive string "foo" in the filename:

find . -print | grep -i foo

Gonroff

find also has the -iname, -regex, and -iregex flags for case-insensitive wildcard, regex, and case-insensitive regex matching, so piping to grep is unnecessary. – Rolandorolandson

I don't think it is about being unnecessary, but being more convenient. – Subeditor

However, piping to grep -v can allow you to use simple strings or regexes to remove entries you don't want. – Rotogravure

@Rolandorolandson - Sadly, I can tell you from experience that not all systems come with a find command that supports those options. Sometimes grep becomes the only option. – Pismire

One important caveat here is that if you're using find on a directory that contains A LOT of files (eg; ``) then this can be quite slow. – Epiphora

Works great. Didn't expect answer to foo but got answers: Fooled Around, Fool Would Say, Fool's Overture, Devil's Food, Foo Fighters, Foot In The Door and Fooling Yourself :) – Substitutive

Answer 3

find will find all files that match a pattern:

find . -name "*foo"

However, if you want a picture:

tree -P "*foo"

Natalianatalie

brew install tree for Mac OSX users w/o apt-get installed – Audiphone

Tested on macOS Sierra, just add '--print' -> ' find . name "*foo" --print ' . superuser.com/questions/177289/searching-mac-through-terminal – Handspike

sudo yum install tree -y for CentOS – Dombrowski

Answer 4

fd

In case find is too slow, try the fd utility - a simple and fast alternative to find written in Rust.

Syntax:

fd PATTERN

Demo:

Homepage: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

Australian

I went to the GitHub link to get the details on it, but it would be worthwhile to edit your post and mention why fd is faster than find. The reason: "Very fast due to parallelized directory traversal" – Parenteau

Answer 5

find -L . -name "foo*"

In a few cases, I have needed the -L parameter to handle symbolic directory links. By default symbolic links are ignored. In those cases it was quite confusing as I would change directory to a sub-directory and see the file matching the pattern but find would not return the filename. Using -L solves that issue. The symbolic link options for find are -P -L -H

Loculus

L switch is very helpful. Many times user do not have any idea about underlying directories, whether they are softlinked or are normal directories. So in case of doubt, it always good to use L option. At least, it has always helped me. – Barbabas

Answer 6

Use

find <directory_path>  -type f -name "<wildcard-match>"

In the wildcard-match you can provide the string you wish to match, e.g., *.c (for all C files).

Tanning

Your answer is the first most correct here as it only searches files as specified. The others not specifying type will return directories. – Inventive

if you wish to search for a directory "-type f" could be changed to "-type d " – Tanning

By default, find detect symbolic file links (but not the ones in symbolic directory links). -type f will cause find to not detect symbolic file links. If you also want to include symlinks that point to a file, use -L: find -L <optional_directory_path> -type f. Don't use -type f,l since it will also include symbolic directory links. – Parlay

Answer 7

If your shell supports a new globbing option (can be enabled by: shopt -s globstar), you can use:

echo **/*foo*

to find any files or folders recursively. This is supported by Bash 4, zsh and similar shells.

---

Personally I've got this shell function defined:

f() { find . -name "*$1*"; }

^{Note: Above line can be pasted directly to shell or added into your user's ~/.bashrc file.}

Then I can look for any files by typing:

f some_name

Alternatively you can use a fd utility with a simple syntax, e.g. fd pattern.

Australian

This just goes into a single level. Not recursing into the sub directories for me – Wonacott

@Wonacott Because you need to activate the extended globbing by shopt -s globstar command. This is supported in Bash, zsh and similar shells. – Australian

bash-3.2$ shopt -s globstar gives bash: shopt: globstar: invalid shell option name – Clishmaclaver

@Clishmaclaver You need to upgrade your Bash to 4.x – Australian

Answer 8

Use

find path/to/dir -name "*.ext1" -o -name "*.ext2"

Explanation

1. The first parameter is the directory you want to search.
2. By default find does recursion.
3. The -o stands for -or. So above means search for this wildcard OR this one. If you have only one pattern then no need for -o.
4. The quotes around the wildcard pattern are required.

Yodel

Answer 9

The default way to search for files recursively, and available in most cases is

find . -name "filepattern"

It starts recursively traversing for filename or pattern from within the current directory where you are positioned. With the find command, you can use wildcards, and various switches. To see the full list of options, type

man find

Or if man pages aren't available at your system:

find --help

However, there are more modern and faster tools than find, which are traversing your whole filesystem and indexing your files. One such common tool is locate or slocate/mlocate. You should check the manual of your OS on how to install it, and once it's installed, it needs to initiate the database. If the install script doesn't do it for you, it can be done manually by typing

sudo updatedb

And, to use it to look for some particular file, type:

locate filename

Or, to look for a filename or pattern from within the current directory, you can type:

pwd | xargs -n 1 -I {} locate "filepattern"

It will look through its database of files and quickly print out path names that match the pattern that you have typed. To see the full list of locate's options, type: locate --help or man locate

Additionally, you can configure locate to update its database on scheduled times via a cron job, so a sample cron which updates the database at 1 AM would look like:

0 1 * * * updatedb

These cron jobs need to be configured by root, since updatedb needs root privileges to traverse the whole filesystem.

Alage

Answer 10

You can use:

find . -type f  -name 'text_for_search'

If you want use a regular expression, use -iname:

find . -type f  -iname 'text_for_search'

Bagley

Answer 11

For file search

find / -xdev -name settings.xml → the whole computer
find ./ -xdev -name settings.xml → the current directory and its subdirectories

For files with an extension type:

find . -type f -name "*.iso"

Payroll

Answer 12

I am surprised to see that locate is not used heavily when we are to go recursively.

I would first do a locate "$PWD" to get the list of files in the current folder of interest, and then run greps on them as I please.

locate "$PWD" | grep -P <pattern>

Of course, this is assuming that the updatedb is done and the index is updated periodically. This is much faster way to find files than to run a find and asking it go down the tree. Mentioning this for completeness. Nothing against using find, if the tree is not very heavy.

Ethiop

locate "$PWD*.mp4" Just to remind that you may be able to skip the grep – Bailey

Answer 13

The following command will list down all the files having the exact name "pattern" (for example) in the current and its sub folders.

find ./ -name "pattern"

Outgo

Downvote. This repeats a 2017 answer. – Thought

@Brian New answers are expected to provide some new info or an alternative solution, repeating what already has been said is not useful. Just like when asking a question, before writing an answer you should search first to make sure your answer will add something useful. Especially when there are lots of other answers, as in such case the possibility of this approaches 0. It's not hard at all, only a single Ctrl+F away. – Globuliferous

Answer 14

This will search all the related files in current and sub directories, calculating their line count separately as well as totally:

find . -name "*.wanted" | xargs wc -l

Webbed

Answer 15

The below command helps to search for any files

1. Irrespective of case
2. Result excluding folders without permission
3. Searching from the root or from the path you like. Change / with the path you prefer.

Syntax:

find <FromDirectory> -iname '<FileName wild char allowed>'   2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"

Example

find / -iname 'C*.xml' 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"

Aristotelianism

why on earth do you use grep for that? Just redirect stderr to null find / -iname '*C*.xml' 2>/dev/null – Perpetua

Answer 16

If you want to search special files with a wildcard, you can use the following code:

find . -type f -name "*.conf"

Suppose, you want to search every .conf files from here:

. means search started from here (current place)
-type means type of search item that here is file (f).
-name means you want to search files with *.conf names.

Choose

Downvote. These should have been comments under or edits of the 2011 accepted answer. – Thought

Answer 17

Try with the fd command if installed. Install instructions.

Find all files that start with 'name':

fd "name*"

This command ignores all .hidden and .gitignoreed files.

To include .gitignoreed files, add the -I option as below:

fd -I "name*"

To include hidden files, add the -H option as below:

fd -H "name*"

Rancho

Answer 18

You can also use ripgrep.

Example:

Search all the filenames contain substring psql,

rg --files | rg psql

Wester

Answer 19

With Python>3.5, using glob, . pointing to your current folder and looking for .txt files:

 python -c "import glob;[print(x) for x in glob.glob('./**/*txt', recursive=True)]"

For older versions of Python, you can install glob2

Dorcas

Can someone explain the downvotes? If there is something wrong with my answer, I would like to know what it is. – This question asks a native solution for Linux shells and you provide an answer in Python. So your answer is off-topic here. – Globuliferous

I don't understand part of your comment @EvgenKo423, since this answer was answered by Katu and not by you. – Postcard

@ValerioBozz Look at the revision history. I had quoted their question and answered it. – Globuliferous

I have seen plenty of questions about sed with accepted answers that use awk and similar. [...] It feels like this is getting downvoted by people following the trend instead of thinking about it. – But both sed and awk are command line tools, while the Python is a full-featured programming language. Downvoting answers costs rep which discourages doing so for no reason, but if you still think it's a voting fraud, have a read of this post. P.S.: Please use comments or Stack Overflow Chat for discussions, they don't belong in answers. – Globuliferous