Question

I prefer to seach with locate command but I don’t know how to perform a partial search with it.

Suppose I want to search file containing the word libevent. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Locate searches for file names. Not file contents.

The ugly way is to use grep It’ll start searching from / directory.

grep -irn 'libevent' /

The better way is to narrow down the suspected directories where this files could exists. Suppose those directories’ full paths are /path/to/dir1, /path/to/dir2 etc. Then invoke the following command.

for dir in /path/to/dir1 /path/to/dir2
do 
     grep -irn 'libevent' $dir
done