There is a very useful command in Linux, called grep. It is a utility for searching plain text files using regular expressions. You can either search files and folders as a parameter, or pipe command outputs to it, such as grep’ing a tail.
For looking for a file:
grep -r "string to find" /folder/to/look/in/
Thats the simple answer.
If you want to pipe the grep to monitor say a tail
tail -f /var/log/maillog | grep "chris@tatedavies.com"
Finding files is a little different to MS DOS!
find <startlocation> <type> <filename> <exec>
The exec is a simple way of performing functions on the results. If you leave it off, the find doesn’t really do anything.
So, the simplest thing to do is find a file, so the exec becomes the output:
find / -name wkhtmltopdf* -exec ls -ls {} \;
That will find all files starting with wkhtmltopdf starting from / and the function to run on it is ls -ls {} \;
The {} will be replaced with the search result, so, in essence, ls -ls filename; will show you the details about the file which is what I want, as I am looking for all copies of the wkhtmltopdf toolkit on the server.
You can obviously change the exec to delete the files, or copy/move them, or interrogate further…
find / -xdev -size +1000000 -exec ls -lh {} \;
The above will list files greater than a gigabyte in size… YOu can pipe it to a file if you need to lower the search size resulting in more files with > filename
find / -xdev -size +1000000 -exec ls -lh {} \; > /home/user/large-files.txt
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