Finding files with find

Searching the whole tree

• ls shows one folder. find searches a folder and everything inside it, however deep:

find .

• . means "start in the current folder". find lists every file and folder it can reach.

Find by name

• Usually you want files matching a pattern. Use -name:

find . -name "*.txt"

• This finds every .txt file in the tree — even ones buried three folders down.
• Quote the pattern ("*.txt") so the shell passes it to find untouched.

Why it is handy

• "Where did I put that file?" — find answers it in one line.
• Combined with pipes, you can act on the results — for example count them with wc -l.

Common mistakes

• find . -name "*.txt" searches by name from the current folder down.
• Quote the pattern so the shell does not expand it first.