Useful Linux Commands: Find and Search
Learning Linux commands is probably the largest hump anybody new to Linux faces. Over the last year, I’ve compiled some useful, and somewhat non-obvious scripts that are really helpful to me on a weekly basis. Here are commands that deal with finding files and searching for text within a file:
Find and delete a directory:
find /PATH/TO/DIR -type d -name SEARCH -exec rm -rf {} \;
Find and delete a file:
find /PATH/TO/DIR -name SEARCH -exec rm -rf {} \;
Search within files:
grep -r "SEARCH" *.EXTENSION /PATH/TO/DIR
Find and search within files:
find /PATH/TO/DIR -name "SEARCH" | xargs -I{} grep -H SEARCH {}
For more advanced options there’s always:
man find man grep