How can I search a wild card name in all subfolders?

Question

How can I search a wild card name in all subfolders? What would be the equivalent of DOS command: dir *pattern* /s in *nix?

score 92 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 11 '12 at 16:11

92

You can use find. If, for example, you wanted to find all files and directories that had abcd in the filename, you could run:

find . -name '*abcd*'

answered Sep 11 '12 at 16:11

Ryan A.

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Just adding a comment in case someone else will encounter the same confusion as I did: `-name` will look for a pattern that matches the filename, i.e. not the full path. So if you are looking for a file containing somewhere in its path the string `string1` followed by `string2` somewhere in the path you should use `find . -wholename "*string1*string2*"`. – Kvothe Jul 28 '21 at 10:00

score 20 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 24 '19 at 12:53

Zsh:

ls -ld -- **/*abcd*

Ksh93:

set -o globstar     # put this line in your ~/.kshrc
ls -ld -- **/*abcd*

Bash ≥4:

shopt -s globstar   # put this line in your ~/.bashrc
ls -ld -- **/*abcd*

Yash:

set -o extendedglob # put this line in your ~/.yashrc
ls -ld -- **/*abcd*

tcsh:

set globstar
ls -ld -- **/*abcd*

fish:

ls -ld -- **abcd*

(beware some of those shells will follow symlinks when descending the directory tree; some of those that don't like zsh, yash or tcsh have ***/*abcd* to do it).

Portable (except to very old systems; OpenBSD took a long time but finally supports exec … + since 5.1):

find . -name '*abcd*' -exec ls -ld {} +

Not POSIX but works on *BSD, Linux, Cygwin, BusyBox:

find . -name '*abcd*' -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld

Note that except in some BSDs, if no matching file is found, ls -ld will be run without arguments, so will list .. With some xargs implementations, you can use the -r option to work around that.

@user2429920 http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Builtin-Index_bt_letter-S and click through to http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#The-Shopt-Builtin then scroll down to `globstar`. — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Mar 05 '15 at 00:39

How can I search a wild card name in all subfolders?

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