I'm having trouble with the "find" command. I had a folder on my desktop, deleted it by accident, and so I restored it from the "trash" gui. Then I used the gui to perform a find command on that folder, I specified the desktop directory, and it can't find the folder (it's right in front of me!) For testing purposes, I even created a folder called "testing 123" on my desktop, used the gui find feature, and it found that folder.

When something goes to the trash bin, and is restored, does it confuse linux?

I tried running "find" by command line, and it still returned no results. But when I used the "find" command on that "testing 123 folder", it found it.

I can't understand why the find command can't detect this folder when it's right there on my desktop. Thanks, Matt

Please specify the actual name of the 'restored' dir and show the cli cmd you used and it's output - exactly.
Ie please copy and paste, instead of describing.

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matt@matt-aspirexc830:~$ find /home/matt/Desktop -name "matt birthday videos (1982) [1080p]"
matt@matt-aspirexc830:~$

Out of curiosity, I shortened the name of that folder, leaving off the [1080p]. Then I ran the command on it:

matt@matt-aspirexc830:~$ find /home/matt/Desktop -name "matt birthday videos (1982)"
/home/matt/Desktop/matt birthday videos (1982)
matt@matt-aspirexc830:~$

You see, now it can find it. Why is that?

most probably there is a hidden char somewhere (or something similar happened). How did you create that original dir?
You need to accept: find is correct, the name you passed to find is not identical to the real name.

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Square brackets are special regex characters, they must be escaped: "\[1080p\]"

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The -name argument accepts a glob pattern - see man glob for details.

You could have searched for "-name 'matt *'" and it would find the bracketed version.

(Note: glob patterns and regex patterns are different things, despite both having character classes.)

That folder I created in the Lubuntu gui desktop by right-clicking, create new folder. But I have a lot of folders where there are brackets in the filenames.

Awesome, that worked, thank you!

matt@matt-aspirexc830:~$ find /home/matt/Desktop -name "matt birthday videos (1982) \[1080p\]"
/home/matt/Desktop/matt birthday videos (1982) [1080p]
matt@matt-aspirexc830:~$

Now I know how to find files. I was backing up some folders/contents and in a hurry, and I dragged a folder to the wrong directory that I didn't recall where. Then I'm thinking, I have a 1.8gb file wasting valuable space somewhere on my solid state hard drive. Now I'm able to find that file and delete it.

When working on *nix of any sort , avoid using whitespace or any kind of bracket/parentheses in a file name ie [] or () or {}.
Also other 'special' chars/punctuation - you'll thank us later

Personally I use dashes and dots in file names.

I want to ask though, why does my Debian 11 (Cinnamon) does use brackets () and space when duplicating files.
Example: someFile > someFile (copy)

Why shouldn't it?

It's a good idea to avoid non-printing characters and newlines, but any other characters are generally either a non-issue or not a big deal.

There can be specific situations where it makes life easier to constrain filenames for that context, and it's probably worth limiting filenames to characters that one's keyboards can produce, but it's not the case that people need to never use spaces or symbols.


find /home/matt -size +1G

(Also, KDE Filelight or ncdu or a whole bunch of similar apps.)

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Yeah, dots/dashes/hyphens are fine - especially for multi-word filenames.

The effect you are getting ie blah(copy) is because you can't have 2 identically named files (or dirs or symlinks ... etc) in the same dir, so if you don't specify a different name, the GUI app (!) will attempt to create something related/meaningful for you.
Note that in the shell it simply says
ie it'll refuse.
What you're seeing is an artefact of the particular GUI program you are running.

HTH