$ find . -name \*man\*
./man
./manual.txt

Note: the backslashes before the asterisks are "escape characters", i.e., they tell the shell not to interpret the asterisk before the find command sees it - see What is the difference between \*.xml and *.xml in find command in Linux/mac. Another alternative is to enclose the *man* within double quotes.

$ find . -name "*man*"
./man
./manual.txt

But, if I only want to find items that have "man" in the name which are directories, I could use the following to specify I only want to see items where the file is of type directory ("d" represents directory and "f" represents a regular file):

$ find . -name \*man\* -type d
./man

By default, the find command will use a logical and for the two conditions, i.e., both conditions must be met. I could explicitly state I want to "and" the two conditions with a -a, but it isn't necessary to do so in this case.

$ find . -name \*man\* -a -type d
./man

But what if I want to to specify a logical "or", i.e. that I want results returned where either of two conditions are met? E.g., suppose I want to find all files where the filename contains man or guide. Then I need to use a -o parameter.

$ find . -name "*man*" -o -name "*guide*"
./man
./manual.txt
./guide.txt

Suppose I only wanted to see only files with man or guide in the filename that are "regular" files and not any directories. I could use -type f to specify that I only want to see regular files.

$ find . -name "*man*" -o -name "*guide*" -type f
./man
./manual.txt
./guide.txt

As you can see, the directory man is still returned. To get the results I want, i.e., to not have the directory man appear in the results, I need to enclose the "or" condtions within parentheses.

$ find . \( -name "*man*" -o -name "*guide*" \) -type f
./manual.txt
./guide.txt

Note: you also need to "escape" the meaning of ( and ) by preceding them with the backslash escape character. Otherwise, you will get an "unexpected token" error message.

$ find . (-name "*man*" -o -name "*guide*") -type f
-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

And you need to put a space after the left parenthesis and before the right parenthesis or you will receive an "invalid predicate" error message.

$ find . \(-name "*man*" -o -name "*guide*"\) -type f
find: invalid predicate `(-name'

As another example, suppose I want to find all HTML or PHP files that contain the word "Geek" within them when the HTML files have a .html extension and the PHP files have a .php extension on the file names. Then I need to use a -o between the conditions to specify that I want to see results if the file has an extension of .html or .php.

$ find . \( -name "*.php" -o -name "*.html" \) -exec grep -i "Geeks" {} /dev/null \;
./temp.php:1Geeks
./temp.html:2Geeks

Whenever a file has a name that ends in .html or .php, the file contents are sent to the grep command for examination. To specify that I want to use a logical or, the -o is placed between -name "*.php" and -name "*.html". Again, I also have to include the two conditions within parentheses to ensure that the "or" condition is checked before sending the results to grep for examination of the contents of the files. If the parentheses aren't used, I would only see one of the files returned.

$ find . -name "*.php" -o -name "*.html" -exec grep -i "Geeks" {} /dev/null \;
./temp.html:2Geeks

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