🕶️ Technique Card: Quickly Finding Files

Unit 101 – Terminal Tigers 🐯 | Rank: Shadow Recruit

ShadowNet Agency: Recruit Training File – Classified Level 1

🎯 Objective

Some files don’t want to be found.
Terminal Tiger Shadow Recruits need elite search skills to uncover hidden threats buried deep in the system.
In this card, you'll learn how to become a digital tracker using the find command.

🛠️ Technique: The `find` Command

find is a command-line tool used to search for files and directories.

🔍 Basic Syntax:

find [where to search] [what to search for]

🧭 Mission Tools

🔹 Search from the Top

To search the entire file system:

find /

This tells your terminal: Start from the root directory and look everywhere.

🔹 Name of the File

Use the -name flag to search by name:

find / -name secret.txt

But what if you don’t know the full name?

🔹 Use Wildcards: `*`

The * means match anything.

find / -name "*secret*"

This finds any file with secret anywhere in its name—like top-secret-file.txt or stolen-secret.txt.

🔹 Silence the Noise

Sometimes you'll see “Permission denied” errors while searching - these errors can make finding what we are looking for very difficult as the terminal window gets cluttered.

Redirect those errors to the void:

find / -name "*secret*" 2>/dev/null

2> means “send errors somewhere”
/dev/null is the black hole of Linux—it swallows anything!

🐾 Try This

🔹 Can you search for all .txt files across the system?

find / -name "*.txt" 2>/dev/null

🔹 Can you find a file if you only know part of its name? Of course you can! So use your new found skills to find a file which includes example-log in its full name.

🕶️ ShadowNet Tip

Combine your tools.
Think like an agent.
Files can hide, but they can’t escape your command line.

The ghosts of the file system leave traces. Use find to follow them.

⬅️ Go to Mission 003: Uncover the Ghost File