If we insert the following function into our .bashrc or .zshrc we can then easily run what I call a “quick find” on the current working directory.

# qfind - used to quickly find files that contain a string in a directory
qfind () {
    find . -exec grep -l $1 {} \;
    return 0
}

Now, when working at the command line we can type qfind to run a “quick find”:

$ cd /var/log/apache2
$ qfind http

Outputs:

./error_log

This indicates that the string “http” is present in the error_log file within the /var/log/apache2 directory.