[ubuntu-uk] find a file

[norman]

< snip >
> 
> Josh Blacker wrote:
> > There are the two commands 'find' and 'locate' from the command line.
> > One is slower because it literally trawls the system to find things,
> > and the other works from a database that's updated every so often - so
> > it can miss newer files. (I think find is the faster one, but I could
> > be wrong) As far as I know, find has many more options than locate (eg
> > to search from the parent directory to a specified depth) - I remember
> > reading about it somewhere.
> 
> find /your/path/to/a/directory -name '*.lck' -print
> 
> Find trawls the files system but appears to cache when re-run with a 
> short (hours) time.  I've ever used locate.  It has a db where it 
> 'locates' files.  BTY, if you are using find on directories that you 
> don't "own", you may need to sudo find has the errors it produces when 
> it doesn't have permission to read a directory can overwhelm the actual 
> output of any search.

Thanks to all who have had a go at answering my question. However, am I
to understand that I need to know where I might find the file I am
seeking before I go looking? If that is the case then it defeats what I
thought was the idea. What I was looking for was a
command which would tell the computer to search every folder on my
system.

Norman