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The find command line utility is a powerful tool for searching your filesystem in Linux and MacOS. A common use case is trying to find all files with a certain extension.

In the following example, we use the find command to find all txt files within the current directory, recursively.

find . -type f -name "*.txt"

Let’s break down how this works:

• The first argument we provide the find command is ., which tells find to start from the current directory. if we wanted to start in a subdirectory called my_directory, our command would be find my_directory -type f -name "*.txt".
• Next up, we have the type flag. As you might intuit, the f is for files. You can also use d for directories.
• Finally, we have the name flag. Since we’re looking for all .txt files, we use a * wildcard to indicate that we don’t really care what the file name is so long as it ends in .txt.

Note that we don’t specify anything for searching recursively—this will be done automatically!