Hello everyone,
I want to find the complete path name of the given file. For example "/home/user/madagascar" is a pathname of madagascar. How to find it using command line. Please help. Regards....

You can use the "locate" command, "locate madagascar" will list the locations of files & paths containing "madagascar".

1 members found this post helpful.

find . -name "*madagascar*"

Or : find /home -name "*madagascar*"

Or use 'locate' as said in the above post.

I assume you understand that 'madagascar' will only be '/home/user/madagascar' under certain circumstances - e.g. pwd = /home/user

With these reasonable assumptions, a quick web search suggests that the following should work:
eta:
limitations with locate: will not find the file if it has been created since the last run of updatedb; may find lots of other entries; may take significant time
limitations with find: "find . ..." won't do the job - results will be prefixed ./ not the full canonical path; if you supply the full working directory, still it may find other matching entries in subdirectories, and may also take a long time (both unless you include -maxdepth 1)

However, you may want to find multiple files not just the file that bash would look for.

1 members found this post helpful.

Use "find" then the return of files found are listed by the shell including their paths.

Example: --you look for the file named "overlay", issue this:

Returns:
/usr/share/fluxbox/overlay

You must specify the -type f otherwise folders are included in search results. If you don't want to experience excuses from find you may issue it with 'sudo' as I have done above, you shall be prompted for the password if you are a sudoer.

Hope this helps.

Goodluck.

locate filename. Served the purpose, It was indeed great to learn run readlink, find along with su. Your help is appreciated.

Since locate uses a database to find the file, it will only find files which where present on the system since the latest update from the database using the command
If you use the old db, you could find files which are deleted or don't find files which are created after the update.

Kind regards

1 members found this post helpful.

Re locate: Try to restrict the search to base names.

Re SecretCode's comment

1. I think (but have not verified) that some versions of mlocate will update the the data base when a file is created.
2. The -b option reduces the number of "false positives," but, you will still find every file or directory containing the string "madagasca."
3. The search is actually quite fast since it takes place in the (indexed) data base of file entries.
4. Depending on the settings in /etc/updatedb.conf, you might locate entries with "madagasca" in them that are system file or which belong to other users. If this is a problem, you can run udatedb in your home directory to create a "personal" data base, and tell locate to use that instead of the default system=wide data base.

See man locate and man updatedb for more information

Some versions may. On my system, I did a quick test
and it found nothing. In fact even now, hours later, it's still not in the locate db.

But as ever, there are lots of solutions to the general problem - which is best depends on the OP's specific requirement which wasn't very precise. I interpreted it as "get the canonical full path of a single file specified relative to the pwd".