Finding a file (locate and find commands)

If we can quickly find the files we are looking for, it will definitely make us happier Linux users. We can search any directory or multiple directories for a file in a Linux system as and when needed. CentOS 7 has two popular utilities that are used to search for files:

• The locate command
• The find command

Locate

This utility performs a search through a previously created database of files and directories available on our system. It matches all entries that contain a specified character string. This sometimes returns a very long list of matching results, which can be further filtered using the grep command, as shown in the following command line:

$ locate zip | grep bin
$ locate iproute2...