Lesson5.File System Navigation Techniques

Lesson 5. File System Navigation Techniques

In this lesson you will use Unix to find files both at the shell prompt and with KDE.

Now that we have learned to navigate the Unix file system by changing directories and being able to list their contents, we need to learn how to search within the entire Unix file system for data based on our own queries. Imagine having to hunt for individual files that you think may be on your system. For example, what if you had an old spreadsheet on your system that you now need to use? Having created it five years ago, you can't recall where you saved it, but you remember a portion of its name. This is where using Unix's built-in help system comes into play.

In this lesson we will cover how to use the internal power of Unix to quickly locate data instead of having to manually search for it. When you are in a situation in which you know the name of a file but do not know where the file is, commands such as grep and find can help you gather the required information. Rather than using the cd and ls commands to search through the entire file system for data that may be located on your system, you can use other Unix commands that will help you locate that data. You can then go to that directory and list its contents. Let's start our discussion with the find command.