How can I find a file whose name includes a given string, such as “abcde”?

Question

Within a set of directories, how do I find a file whose name includes a given string, such as "abcde"?

Answer 1

find will look through a directory structure and return results based on a glob:

find /your/dir -name "*abcde*"

Adding the -type f switch will refine your search criteria to only return files.

find /your/dir -type f -name "*abcde*"

You could also include other switches like -maxdepth 2 to restrict the search to 2 levels of directories bellow the specified one.

In this way you can build up a rich, highly targetted search command that will quickly return exactly what you need.

man find has a wealth of detail, including actions like -exec to run a command on the files returned by find and options to use regular expressions.

Answer 2

Use find:

find path-to-search -name '*abcde*'

Answer 3

If locate suits you (it is fast, but only as good as the most recent run of sudo updatedb). You can run locate using its own built-in regex facility...

Here is a parameter driven script to do what you want. Call it with $1 as the "abcde" you are looking for and with subsequent parameters as the directories:

#!/bin/bash
a=("$@"); r=''
for ((i=1;i<${#a[@]};i++)); do r="$r|${a[i]}"; done
locate --regex  "(${r:1}).*/[^/]*${a[0]}[^/]*$"

An example call looks like this:

$ ./script_name 'z' "$HOME/bin/perl" "$HOME/type/stuff"

---

As suggested by jasonwryan, here is a commented version of the script.
Bear in mind that locate always outputs fully-qualified paths.

#!/bin/bash

# Note: Do not use a trailing / for directory names
# 
# Any of the args can be an extended regex pattern. 
#
# Create an array `a` which contains "$1", "$2", "$3", etc... (ie. "$@")
# writing the $-args to an array like this (using quotes) solves 
#   any possible problem with embedded whitespace 
a=("$@")
#
# Set up an empty string which is to be built into a regex pattern 
#   of all directroy names (or an appropriate regex pattern)
r=''
#
# Each regex pattern is to be an extended regex    
# Each regex pattern is concatenated to the preceding one 
#   with the  extended-regex 'or' operator |
#
# Step through the array, starting at index 1 (ie, $2),
#   and build the 'regex-pattern' for the directories 
for ((i=1;i<${#a[@]};i++)); do r="$r|${a[i]}"; done
#
# Run 'locate' with
#                           |the target file pattern $1  | 
#                |zero-to-| |preceded and followed by    |
#                |-many   | |zero-to-many non-slash chars|
#                |anything| |               |‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
#                 ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾|| |               |   
locate --regex  "(${r:1}).*/[^/]*${a[0]}[^/]*$"
#        ________|      |  | 
#       |directory-regex| last
#       | in brackets ()| slash      
#       |stripped of its|
#       |leading "|"    |
#

Answer 4

locate abcde | egrep "(dirA|dirB|dirC)" 

for the set of directories dirA, dirB, dirC.

Or 3 find-commands.