c : character devices (serial ports, sound cards).b : block devices (such as a hard drive for example).Here is a recap of all the file types used on Linux. Find files using find by filetypeĪs we previously discussed in our article on hard and soft links, files are assigned file types and it is used as a way to differentiate them.

I redirected the error output to /dev/null using output redirection to avoid error messages on the console. The main difference between find and locate when it comes to searching for files is that find will lookup for filenames while locate will look for paths to the file.įor example, if we go back to the runlevel example we used before, here’s how to look for runlevel files using the find command. The most common usage of the find function is to locate files given their filenames. Here are all the possibilities of the find function on Linux.

Remember that for the grEP is Expression Path, and find is the opposite, so Path Expression!įind is a pretty powerful command as it has way more options than the locate command. Quick tip : do you have some trouble remembering if path or expression comes first? The first way to find and locate files on a Linux host is to use the find command.īy default, the find command is available on all distributions and it has the following syntax $ find

Unix ls find files by date modified