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user55596
Asked: 2012-04-19 17:48:06 +0800 CST

How to find a folder on my server with a certain name?

  • 772

I have a directory somewhere on my server wth the name "exampledocs". I tried to find it's location using:

ls -d */ | grep -E 'exampledocs'

and 

find * -regextype posix-extended \-regex 'exampledocs' \-type d

and

grep "exampledocs" * --recursive

Nothing worked. How can I do this from the command line? I'm using Ubuntu Server 11.0.

command-line directory find

4 Answers

  1. This also should work

    find folder_full_path -name exampledocs -type d
    • 89
  2. Best Answer
    find / -xdev 2>/dev/null -name "exampledocs"

    Note: This is from Debian, but it should work.

    • 72

  3. locate exampledocs | grep /exampledocs$

    • 7

  4. With bash's globstar shell option and [[ evaluation, we can make use of recursive globbing and prefix removal to find directories that contain the needed string. Here's how I'd search for bin folder:

    bash-4.3$ shopt -s globstar
bash-4.3$ for f in ./**/* ; do [ -d "$f" ] && [[ "${f##*/}" =~ ^bin$ ]] && echo "$f" ; done
./bin
./Desktop/TODAY/bin
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