Originally published at: Linux Essentials – The find command – LearnLinuxTV
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This was pure gold. @jay you did an excellent job showing the power of find in Linux. Just those few examples that you illustrated will be enough to move me away from locate. I’m sure it is simply because I haven’t taken the time to learn the flags and options for find, but years ago I learned about locate and saw it as just a better find command. But locate is not always installed in a distro out of the box, and if you have made any significant changes to your system you really need to run sudo updatedb every time before you run locate. I could have used the examples you showed in this video along with your permissions video, which was also pure gold, to fix the file permissions in my /var/www/html directory.
Now if I could just find a command that would search file contents as well. I know there are ways to search the file contents of text files, but I have hundreds of LibreOffice, older MS Office, and even older WordPerfect files, RTF’s, and PDF’s at work that I sometimes want to find something by text that I know is in the document. Google Drive seems to be able to peek into the contents of certain files, but since I have my documents moved from Google Drive, I would like to do this locally on my Linux machines. If anyone knows a utility that searches file contents of the file types listed above let me know.
I’m sure there’s a better way, but my initial thought is Nextcloud. That has quite a bit of overhead though, but I’m fairly certain you can achieve this there. Hopefully someone knows a simpler way though.