Question

Using ack (sometimes packaged as ack-grep) I know that I can find paths that contain a specific string by doing:
ack -g somestring

But what if I only want files which have “somestring” in their filenames?

Answer 1

You can use find utility. Something like this:

find /path/to/look/in -name '*somestring*' -print

On some systems, if you omit the path, current directory is used. On other systems you can’t omit it, just use . for current directory instead.

Also, read man find for many other options.