Finding files in your home directory

The find command can be used to find files whose names contain the specified substring. The command find works recursively down the directory tree from the specified starting point. Suppose you want to find all the files named core in your home directory. You would use find as follows (with example output):

[alice@onyx]: find ~ -name "core" -print
/home/alice/public_html/teaching/430/lab/project-ideas/l2h10619/core
/home/alice/res/now/zpl/examples/core
/home/alice/res/bob-katherine/backsearch/core
/home/alice/.gnome-desktop/core

Note that find is much slower than locate since it is actually traversing the directory tree to find the files whereas locate uses a pre-built database. However find can perform many other functions recursively on a directory tree that locate cannot.