Finding packages

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Searching the file system

When you work on a program source tree, or even just a collection of doc 

uments, the editor you use may well make a backup copy of the file, so you

can recover to the last good version if the changes turn out to be really bad.

When you are finished with all the edits, it is useful to be able to remove all

those backup files. For instance joe adds the character to the end of the file

name, so the command:

rm `find ./  name ``* ''`

will search all of the directories in the current path for file with a name that

ends in and provide those names as a list of files for the rm command. This

is a very useful method of using one command to produce output that is acted

upon by another command. In this case the accent character (`) is used to

bracket the find command, causing it to be executed, with the output from

the find command being used as the argument list for the rm command. Thus,

each file found to end with the character is removed by the rm command.

A simpler use of the find command is to locate a configuration file on the

system. Thus, the command:

find printcap

will list:

/etc/printcap

as the location for that file. If you forgot where you saved that important file,

find will save the day. For more information on the find command, or any of

the other commands discussed above, see your friendly man and info pages.

With a little investigation you can learn all about the capabilities of your new

Debian GNU/Linux system.