Quick Start Guide

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 oers 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]
102 Start-Up