Unix-type “locate” on Windows?

Question

Using the Windows CLI (cmd), how does one locate a file that he knows part of the name of? For instance, every single Windows workstation installs javac in a different location, how would one find it from the Windows CLI (cmd)?

Googling I see mention only of using the Windows Explorer (file manager) GUI or downloading some freeware application. Does Windows really not have a locate command built in? Do the server editions have it? I do not want to install cygwin or anything else, these are typically not my machines.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You should be able to do what you need to do with dir:

dir [filename] /s

Replace [filename] with the filename you're looking for, you should be able to use wildcards. /s makes it search sub-directories so if you need to you can start in the root of C: and have it check the entire drive.

Answer 2

Windos has the most straightforward answer. But if you're fond of the command line, you may want to look at powershell too. To accomplish the same type of search you'd use

get-childitem [starting path eg c:\users\] -filter [wildcarded search or filename] -recurse

Which has the nice side benefit of being able to be pumped into a handy foreach statement and run a process against the search results.

get-childitem [starting path eg c:\users\] -filter [wildcarded search or filename] -recurse |
    foreach ($_){
          [do something to $_.fullname , like maybe display my image file or relocate it etc..]
    }

Answer 3

I'm not aware of any CLI method to do this in Windows. Keep in mind that the Windows CLI has been abandoned by common users, so it offers a generally less mature set of tools. Your best bet might be using the gnu find in Windows, which you can get from GnuWin32. If you're developing a script, you'd just have to include find.exe and its dependencies with the script (don't worry, it's not very big).