Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by an anonymous reader of this blog. Who goes by the name “Rand“

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Today we will look at some of the common ways to search for files in Linux using the Terminal.

1) find : To search for files on the command line you can use the command “find”. The following is syntax for the “find” command:

find path criteria action

“path” - The section of the files system to search (the specific directories and all the sub directories). If nothing is specified the file system below the current directory is used.

“criteria” - The file properties.

“action” - Options that influence conditions or control the search as a whole, ie,
“–print”

2) locate : The command “locate” is an alternative to the command “find -name”. The command find must search through the selected part of the file system, a process that can be quite slow. On the other hand, locate searches through a database previously created for this purpose (/var/lib/locatedb), making it much faster. The database is automatically created and updated daily. But change made after the update has been performed are not taken into account by locate, unless the database is updated manually using the command updatedb.

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Today Fedora celebrates it’s 5th birthday. Before Ubuntu craze, linux was mostly about fedora and it sill maintains a very unique and strong following of users. So let’s take a moment and say cheer’s to Fedora! if you are new to Fedora, you might want to check out the Fedora Overview and recent developments going on with Fedora 9.

Joe Brockmeier over at Zdnet wrote a nice article on this occasion.

You have five minutes and ten sentences to explain Linux to a complete newbie, without the geekery mumbo jumbo. What would you say? Here is my take:

1) Linux is a Kernel.

2) Linux Kernel is the main component of all Linux Operating System.

3) The word “Linux” can be used to describe both the “Linux kernel” and the “operating system”.

4) Linux has many “distributions“.

5) Linux Distribution is a collection of applications bundled with the Kernel.

6) Ubuntu is one of the many, and the most widely used, Linux Distributions.

7) Linux is a safe operating system and viruses are very rare.

8) Linux is free.

9) Linux is highly customizable, like any open source software.

10) Linux is the leading embedded OS, which means you probably used Linux already without knowing about it.

Today, I have been playing around a bit with the new version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) Alpha 6 release. As expected the release itself is not very stable and broke my Ubuntu install in a lot of places including compiz fusion. I was expecting an Alpha release to act like this so I installed it on one of my several “test machines”, where I can go crazy with it without having to worry about breaking something. If you plan to try out the any alpha release, please don’t try it on your main machine. Under normal circumstances, when there is a new release of Ubuntu, you can just pull up your synaptic package manager and you will be prompted to upgrade to the latest version. In case of Alpha or Beta releases, you will have to manually upgrade from an existing install from the terminal with: sudo update-manager -d

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