Shells in a Nutshell

ederts · 05-24-2001, 11:50 PM

Hi! It's me again. I'm on the chapter that discuss about "Shells in a Nutshell". It illustrates how a command is interpreted by the shell.

This is the scenario. I log in as root and I'm on the root (/) directory. I want to search these external commands (ls, rm, cp, adduser, etc) but I can't find it using "find" command to search files.

The syntax is:
find [path ] [expression]

I typed:
[root@technical /]# find / adduser

But what happened was that it displayed all the files. Files that I don't want to find except on adduser. Like in MSDOS if I type: "dir myfile.doc /s /p" it should search on what directory I can locate the myfile.doc.

Any help? Sorry for asking just want to go around with this new OS. I already tried every option that I understand but still I can't make it.

Cheers,

Ederts

[Edited by ederts on 05-25-2001 at 12:53 AM]

jharris · 05-25-2001, 05:22 AM

You want to use the following

Code:

find / -name adduser

If the file is in you path then you can also use

Code:

whereis find

One thing that caught me out for a while was the shell expanding wild cards on me, for example when I tried something like

Code:

find / -name *user

the search would fail (almost before it got started). The shell was trying to expand the *user in the same way it would if you issued 'rm *user', what you need to use in such situations is

Code:

find / -name \*user

to stop the shell being 'helpful'.

Man pages are your friends...

HTH

Jamie...