How to find a file based on name easily from thousands files

Hi

I would use:

ls /directory | grep <name you are looking for>

For Speed use locate command

locate is fast but only if the index is kept up to date. It searches through a prebuilt database which is updated using the command updatedb .

Can you run find on the server machine?

If it is just thousands of files just scroll them on screen. In couple of hours you will be ready

If it is a lot more...
find /wherever -type f -name \*heeeeelp\*

you said you want to find files...and let find expand wildcard, not the shell

If you don't know what directory or sub-set of directories the file might exist in and you don't have an index of the files (via locate or any other similar command), then you are essentially stuck with the speed of traversing NFS.

Note that

find ./  -name "**"

is effectively the same as

find ./

ie:  it will match everything.

Make sure you include part of the filename in the match, eg:

find . -name "filename*"