Finding Things

What You’ll Learn

You know how to move around the filesystem and read files. But what about when you need to actually find something? Maybe you’re looking for a specific file buried deep in a project, or you need to track down every place a function is called.

This is where things get powerful. The commands in this module are some of the most-used by AI coding tools — and once you understand them, you’ll see why.

By the end of this module, you’ll be able to:

• Find files by name anywhere in a project using find
• Search inside files for specific text using grep
• Count lines, words, and characters with wc

These three commands are the backbone of how AI tools explore and understand your codebase. When Claude Code needs to figure out where a function is defined or how many config files exist, these are the commands it reaches for.

Try It Now

Go ahead and type find . -name "*.js" in the terminal.

That command just searched every folder starting from your current location and found all the JavaScript files. We’ll break down exactly how that works in the next lesson.

Ready? Let’s learn to find things.