How can I find a specific file on an Ubuntu machine?
There's the find
command but is there a graphical UI to find a file?
I know you asked for a GUI, but there is also other fast CLI ways, like:
The first command create a index, the second use the index to search.
(maybe there is some GUI frontend to locate
)
Use Places | Computer (or Places | Home or any other location) and then use the 'search' button (its a looking-glass icon)
You'll soon go back to the command-line though ;)
You have two options:
The find
tool can be used as following:
find -type f -name "data.txt" # search file that are named "data.txt"
find -type f -name "*.txt" # search file that end with ".txt" string
find -type d -name "*conf" # search file folder end with "conf" string
find -type f -name "*conf*" # search file that contains conf in their name
The locate tool work slightly different. In first instance you have to initialize a new DB that contains all the entry for your filesystem with the command updatedb
. After some minutes that the index is generated, you can query the db using locate file_name
Main differences:
find
does not need to index your filelocate
need to create an index of the filesystem