I am using CentOS minimal version and I am trying to locate a file, but I have no idea how to search all of the server for the file. I am sure there is a command out there to do it, can anyone help me?
Try this command:
find / -name file.look
CentOS is Linux, so as in just about all other Unix/Linux systems, you have the find command. To search for files within the current directory:
find -name "filename"
You can also have wildcards inside the quotes, and not just a strict filename. You can also explicitly specify a directory to start searching from as the first argument to find:
find / -name "filename"
will look for "filename" or all the files that match the regex expression in between the quotes, starting from the root directory. You can also use single quotes instead of double quotes, but in most cases you don't need either one, so the above commands will work without any quotes as well. Also, for example, if you're searching for java files and you know they are somewhere in your /home/username, do:
find /home/username -name *.java
There are many more options to the find command and you should do a:
man find
to learn more about it.
One more thing: if you start searching from / and are not root or are not sudo running the command, you might get warnings that you don't have permission to read certain directories. To ignore/remove those, do:
find / -name 'filename' 2>/dev/null
That just redirects the stderr to /dev/null.