Insider Tips:F ind and Locate
Lost and Found
Modern computers with their multiple Gigabyte hard disks store thousands of files. A lost file can cause a lot of work,and it can also pose a security risk. Fortunately,Linux has some versatile tools for finding those “lost files.”
If you are looking for files in Linux, the command line is your best option for quick and reliable results. GUIs such as KDE (Figure 1) typically lack comparable functionality, flexibility, and speed. The most important command for file searching is find. Without any flags specified, the tool will just find all the files below the current directory. If you want to search another directory, simply specify the directory name as the first argument. For example, find /home will output a list of the files and directories below /home.