ls - searching subdirectories

Nature Boy

This is probably a dumb ass question but here goes...

I know that ls -R lists all files in all subdirectories recursively, but how do I search for a file in all subdirs?

so for example, if I want to search for *.c files in the current dir and all subdirs, how do I do it using ls (dir /s *.c in DOS)?

Dopey

find . -name \*.c

Nature Boy

Cool thanks.

That exact command didn't work but find -name *.c does...

electrofelix

Nature Boy wrote:

Cool thanks.

That exact command didn't work but find -name *.c does...

Dopey was probably trying to avoid shell expansion. If you have a file called file.c in the current directory that command you used will end up searching all the sub dirs for file.c not *.c

better way to make sure you get what you want

find . -name '*.c'

Prevents shell expansion.

Also you may find that
find . -type f -name '*.c'

is significantly faster if there are a lot of directories and you only want a file. Because it will skip matching any directory names with the name pattern.