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โ‡ฑ How To Use Find and Locate to Search for Files on Linux | DigitalOcean


How To Use Find and Locate to Search for Files on Linux

Updated on March 20, 2026
๐Ÿ‘ How To Use Find and Locate to Search for Files on Linux

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About the author(s)

Former Senior Technical Writer at DigitalOcean, specializing in DevOps topics across multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, as well as Debian 10 and 11.

๐Ÿ‘ Vinayak Baranwal
Vinayak Baranwal
Editor
Technical Writer II
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Building future-ready infrastructure with Linux, Cloud, and DevOps. Full Stack Developer & System Administrator. Technical Writer @ DigitalOcean | GitHub Contributor | Passionate about Docker, PostgreSQL, and Open Source | Exploring NLP & AI-TensorFlow | Nailed over 50+ deployments across production environments.

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Is there a fairly simple way to delete all of those files and directories we created in the โ€œFiltering by Depthโ€ section of this tutorial?

Iโ€™m still learning the basics of Linux, and a simple simple rm combined with rmdir will take quite a bit of timeโ€ฆ Perhaps some sort of mv โ€˜targetโ€™ >> null approach?

@wizardware: You can:

<ul><li>delete ~/test completely by running <code>rm -r ~/test</code>; or</li> <li>delete all of the files/directories in ~/test by running <code>rm -r ~/test/</code>; or</li> <li>delete all of the files/directories in ~/test that start with <strong>level</strong> by running <code>rm -r ~/test/level</code>;</li></ul>

I think there is a typo in this section: http://d.pr/i/15yf3

It should have -type f and -type d respectively.

You can use KrojamSoft FilesSearch Tool, it helped me out on many cases. Hope this helped you out!

find -mindepth 4 -name file
find -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 3 -name file

The above need โ€œfileโ€ to be changed to โ€œfile1โ€ otherwise they get no hits

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