if you have installed KDE desktop or
locate .gnome
if you have installed GNOME desktop.
You will see that locate displays all le names in the database that contain
the string .kde or .gnome anywhere. To learn how to modify this behavior refer
to the man page of locate.
2 To search your home directory for all occurrences of lenames that contain
the le extension .txt, use
find ~ -name '*.txt' -print
3 To search a directory (in this case, your home directory) for all occurrences
of les which contain, for example, the word music, enter
grep music ~/*
Note that grep is case-sensitive— unless you use it with the -i option. With
the command above you will not nd any les containing Music.
If you want to use a search string which consists of more than one word, en-
close the string in double quotation marks, for example:
grep "music is great" ~/*
7.9 Viewing Text Files
When searching for the contents of a le with grep, the output gives you the line in
which the searchstring was found along with the lename. Often this contextual
information is still not enough information to decide whether you want to open and
edit this le. Bash oers you several commands to have a quick look at the contents
of a text le directly in the shell, without opening an editor.
head
With head you can view the rst lines of a text le. If you do not specify the
command any further, head shows the rst 10 lines of a text le.
tail
The tail command is the counterpart of head. If you use tail without any further
options it displays the last 10 lines of a text le. This can be very useful to view
log les of your system, where the most recent messages or log entries are usu-
ally found at the end of the le.
less
With less, display the whole contents of a text le. To move up and down half a
page use [Page ↑] and [Page ↓]. Use [Space] to scroll down one page. [Home]
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