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Ian
Asked: 2009-05-01 15:12:27 +0800 CST

How to Find a file in FreeBSD

  • 772

I'm trying to locate all copies of example.filename on my FreeBSD server. What's the best / easiest / most efficient way to do this?

linux files freebsd find grep

7 Answers

  1. locate filename

    Much faster than find, if you're running the locate service, and it only finds files that existed at the time updatedb last ran (usualy the night befor under the control of a cron job).

    You can run updatedb by hand, but that is even slower than the find cletus suggests, and requires root. I sometimes update the database by hand after installing a bunch of new stuff.

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  2. Best Answer
    find / -name example.filename
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  3. If you've got locate (aka slocate) installed, then

    locate example.filename

    locate runs a cron job every night that reindexes all the files on your machine. It's not always up to date for that reason.

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  4. Sometimes you want to find files at a specific directory level. In this case it can be convenient to use shell wildcards:

    ls /data/*/example.filename

    Obviously this only works if you have a rigid directory structure.

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  5. I sometimes do 

    
  find . | grep example.filename

    probably hugely inefficient however.

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  6. locate

    As others mentioned, locate is the fast way to find a file. This command uses an pre-compiled index of the file and folder names. This database of names is searched, rather than crawling through your file system.

    locate example.filename

    To be case-insensitive, add -i.

    locate -i eXAmPle.FileName

    Update locate database

    The database used by locate must be up-to-date. After doing an install or download that may contain your desired file, you must update the locate database.

    The locate database will eventually be updated automatically by your FreeBSD system. There is a weekly set of chores that includes this task. These chores are listed in the /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate script.

    The easiest safest way to force the early updating of the locate database is to force the weekly set of chores to be done now.

    sudo periodic weekly

    Or, you could even force all the regular chores to be done. You might want to do this immediately after setting up a new FreeBSD system.

    sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

    If using other avenues to update the locate database, you may get a message about being unsafe, revealing the names of all your system’s files to any user on the FreeBSD system. Using the periodic route avoids this problem.

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  7. If you have the locate database up-to-date, then just:

    locate example.filename
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