find-command for certain subdirectories

Question

Let's say I have a directory dir with three subdirectories dir1 .. dir3. And inside I have many files and other subdirectories.

I'd like to search for a file inside, say with a *.c ending, but I'd only like to search in subdirectory "dir/dir2" and all its subdirectories. How can I formulate that?

Assuming I'm in dir/ I have:

find . -name "*.c"

to search in all directories.

How do I restrict to only dir2?

Answer 1

Find will accept any valid path so

find ./dir2 -name '*.c'

should do the trick

If the dir directory is /home/user/dir you could give find the full path

find /home/user/dir/dir2 -name '*.c'

Answer 2

Assuming you are in dir

find dir2 -name '*.c'

of course Iain's answer is also correct

Answer 3

You can do find dir2 -name '*.c'

You could also do (cd dir2; find -name '*.c')

If you wanted to look at dir1 and dir3 but not dir2, you could do find {dir1,dir3} -name '*.c'

Answer 4

You could also use the -path parameter of find in place of -name:

find . -path "dir2/*.c"

This could allow you to find files in dir2 even if dir2 were not a direct subdirectory, E.G:

# find . -path "*/dir2/*.c"
./dir_a/dir2/file.c
./dir_b/dir2/file.c