If i am in the root directory and i need to search for a specific file in the sysconfig directory, is there any way to search this directory for a file?

Sure, you can use find--
If you've got locate/slocate/mlocate on your system you can also type:

Locate is typically faster than find over a large structure, but requires you to generally crontab the updatedb program to run daily/weekly/monthly... and it's results are only as recent as the last time the updatedb ran.

I am sorry but i didn't explain myself properly.
Let's say i don't know where the file is located but i know the name of the file?

Just adapt the commands above or, as suggested, try locate.

The man pages are always the best place to look; man find

I greatly appreciate that.

Thank you very much

I very seldom know the exact name of a file so I use "krusader" to do my file search. Just open krusader, go to "tools" in the top toolbar. Click on search. If the file name is "johnwenttotown" just type in john, on the second line type in"/" to search all. It will give you every file that starts with john and what directory they are in. If you click on it, it will take you to that file.

It's exactly the same commands you just change the base path for the find and the locate would remain exactly the same--Which will search the entire drive for "filename" without case sensitivity.

If you knew it was somewhere in /etc then...

I find the easiest way to do this is by using the following, its quick and dirty and it works

This will search the entire folder structure

To search just the current folder you are in

Use the more for page viewing if a long list. Otherwise you can remove it.

Am I wrong in doing it this way?

It works so I am not complaining.

I just always did this: sudo find / -name 'nameoffile'

or if you are looking for a program's install directory type this:

which nameofprogram

It helps if you are root!

If you only know part of the filename you can use wildcards with find (piping find's output to grep is a less efficient way of doing the same thing). If it's an ordinary file (not a directory, a device file ...) then you can speed find along by specifying so. If you are not running the find as root then find will generate a lot of error messages when it can't enter directories; you don't need to see these because you can't reach any files in those directories. Combining all the aboveThe single quotes around *foo* are required in case there are any files matching *foo* in the current directory.

You're not wrong, but you miss some of the more advanced features of find...

Will find any file with .htm under /var/www and chown it to apache:apache and change the perms to 644. Then change every directory under /var/www to 755 and chown them to apache:apache also.

You can accomplish this with piping also but its generally far easier using the advanced structures of find... and for me personally, "-iname filename" or " | grep filename" I'll take the one with the lesser amount of typing, plus to make grep case insensitive you'd also have to add -i which makes it longer yet. Economy of typing.

Honestly though, that's one of the great things about unix, there are 10 different ways you can go about many tasks.

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