Linux has had the find command since the 1970s. It was probably great in it's day, but it's not very modern and isn't the most intuitive tool. I found fd (sometimes called fd-find) which is infinitely better and easier to use. If you're looking for a simple way to search your filesystem, it's the way to go.

fd-find is hosted on Github.

I needed to search recursively through a directory structure for files that matched a specific pattern. The simplest way that I found was using File::Find. I wrote a simple wrapper function to make searching simpler and more straight-forward. It uses regular expression matching so it should be quite flexible.

use File::Find;

# All the files that end in .pl
my @perl_files = find_recurse(qr/\.pl$/, "/home/user/");
# Anything with kitten in the name
my @kittens    = find_recurse(qr/kitten/, "/home/user/");
# All .mp3 and .ogg files
my @aud_files  = find_recurse(qr/\.(mp3|ogg)$/, "/home/user/");
# Search two directories
my @cfg_files  = find_recurse(qr/\.cfg$/, ("/tmp/", "/etc/"));

# Recursively search for files matching a pattern
sub find_recurse {
    my ($pattern, @dirs) = @_;
    if (!@dirs) {
        @dirs = (".");
    }

    my @ret = ();
    find(sub { if (/$pattern/) { push(@ret, $File::Find::name) } }, @dirs);

    return @ret;
}