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

Use find:

find . -name "foo*"

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

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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

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find will find all files that match a pattern:

find . -name "*foo"

However, if you want a picture:

tree -P "*foo"

Hope this helps!

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fd

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

Syntax:

fd PATTERN

Demo:

https://github.com/sharkdp/fd/raw/master/doc/screencast.svg?sanitize=true

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

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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

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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.

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Use

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

Explanation

The first parameter is the directory you want to search. By default find does recursion. 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. The quotes around the wildcard pattern are required.

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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)

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You can use:

# find . -type f  -name 'text_for_search'

If you want use REGX use -iname

# find . -type f  -iname 'text_for_search'

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for file search
find / -xdev -name settings.xml --> whole computer
find ./ -xdev -name settings.xml --> current directory & its sub directory

for files with extension type

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

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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.

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Default way to search for recursive file, and available in most cases is

find . -name "filepattern"

It starts recursive traversing for filename or pattern from within current directory where you are positioned. With find command, you can use wildcards, and various switches, to see 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 then find, which are traversing your whole filesystem and indexing your files, one such common tool is locate or slocate/mlocate, you should check manual of your OS on how to install it, and once it's installed it needs to initiate database, if install script don'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 filename or patter from within 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 pattern that you have typed. To see full list of locate's options, type: locate --help or man locate

Additionally you can configure locate to update it's database on scheduled times via cron job, so sample cron which updates db at 1AM would look like:

0 1 * * * updatedb

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

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

find ./ -name "pattern"

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If you want to search special file with wildcard, you can used 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.

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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 -iname '' 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied" Example

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

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

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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

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Try with fd command if installed. Install instruction

find all file starts with 'name'

fd "name*"

This command ignores all .hidden and .gitignoreed files.

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

fd -I "name*"

To include hidden files, add -H option as below

fd -H "name*"

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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

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