<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="MS Exchange Server version 6.5.7652.24"> <TITLE>Re: find a file</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY>  find -name "searchterm" / Will search the entire drive for files... As to the secondary question regarding grep, to find a specific word in a file (or files) in a directory, I usually do this little shell script, typed at the commandline- for word in `ls` do cat $word | grep "searchword" done That will search each file in a directory and tell you which files have the word you want (if any) I wouldn't recommend this for extremely large directories (or an entire disk). ----- Original Message ----- From: ubuntu-users-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com <ubuntu-users-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com> To: Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions <ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com> Sent: Mon Aug 06 07:21:46 2007 Subject: Re: find a file On 8/6/07, norman <norman@littletank.org> wrote: Although I have used Ubuntu for quite some time I have never been sure how to go about finding named files. I am not a Linux person although, I can use a terminal if needed. For example I needed to find any files with .lck as the extension and remove them otherwise I would be unable to burn DVDs using Mthtv. So, I went to Places -> Search for files, entered *.lck and the report was no files found. Yet there had to be at least one file which was causing me the problem. That's one problem I have too. Sometimes I find things using the "locate -R" command, but sometimes it doesn't work. I still haven't learned how to search things on linux. I have also looked on man and google about how to use the grep command, but still haven't figured out how to find things this way. A couple of days ago, I wanted to find all the files containing a specific word, but couldn't figure out how to use the grep command. =( Allan </BODY> </HTML>