< 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 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/