Terminal command to search for a file

Windows Terminal comes with a search feature that allows you to look through the text buffer for a specific keyword. This is useful when trying to find a command you had run before or for a specific file name. Once opened, you can type the keyword you're looking for into the text box and hit enter to search.

Configuration: Powerline in PowerShell. The terminal will default to searching from the bottom to the top of the text buffer. You can change the search direction by selecting one of the arrows in the search dialog. This command is the straightforward option for finding files on Unix-based systems. To use it at its basics, you specify the location to start your search, and then options like file names and file types.

When executed, it will walk the folder hierarchy from that specified point and output the full paths to the files that match your search criteria. The locate database is an effort to have an indexed search in Unix systems. As with all of these commands, the mdfind command has a number of additional options that can be implemented for limiting and customizing its search scope, which can be looked up in the mdfind manual page.

With these commands, you can easily output the full path to files you may be interested in locating, and then be able to access them either in the Finder or use the full path in subsequent Terminal commands. To reveal items in the finder, simply triple-click one of the paths to select it, and then right-click the selection and choose "Reveal in Finder" from the Services contextual submenu. Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us! Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic.

Active 1 year, 6 months ago. Viewed k times. KumarAnkit 1 1 gold badge 7 7 silver badges 23 23 bronze badges. Possible duplicate of superuser. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. It finds directories as well as files. I have another question, how to copy these found documents to another folder? THanks a lot — Hong Cheng. This refuses to find files I know are present within a subfolder of the current directory. Navigating to that folder and searching produces the result, but it is not found when searching via a parent directory.

Is there any other more robust command? Tim 4, 5 5 gold badges 36 36 silver badges 54 54 bronze badges. Vinod Srivastav Vinod Srivastav 2, 1 1 gold badge 23 23 silver badges 32 32 bronze badges. More info about using clip.

More info about the dir command.