Searching for a File in the Terminal Using the find Command

If you are looking for find a file based on its name, the find command does a mighty good job at doing just that.

For example, if you are looking for an image with the name arrows in it, you could use find in the following way:

$ find . -iname "arrows*"
./library/images/arrows.png
./library/images/arrowsAnimation.gif

The -iname flag is for a case-insensitive search. The -name command is used for a case-sensitive search. The * is a wildcard; it looks for any file that starts with arrows and is followed by anything else. It returns a list of the file locations that match the search. The . directs the find command to search in the current directory and its subdirectories.

If I wanted to find all PNG image files, I would use:

$ find . -iname "*.png"
./favicon.png
./_site/favicon.png

This looks for and outputs any file whose name ends in .png.

This is super useful for quickly finding where files are located. Enjoy!