Day 6 – “Where Did It Go?!” | Mastering the find, head, tail, and wc Commands in RHEL 9

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Let me paint you a picture.

You're sitting at your terminal. You know you downloaded that important file somewhere. Maybe in Downloads. Or Documents. Or... was it in the mysterious /tmp?

You try clicking around, but there’s no clicky. Just blinking text. Panic sets in.

But wait — you have a superpower now. It’s called the command line, and today, we’re wielding four little heroes who will help you find what’s missing, peek inside files, and count like a digital mathematician.

Meet the Squad

find: The Detective

find is like the Sherlock Holmes of the Linux terminal. You give it a clue — a filename, a directory, maybe a wildcard — and it scours your system like a caffeine-powered bloodhound.

That says: “Dear Linux, go search everywhere inside /home for a file called notes.txt.” It's fast, it’s sharp, and it doesn’t stop until it gets results.

Bonus: It’s also great for hunting down lost dignity after a failed rm command.

head: The Chiller

You know when you only want to read the first few pages of a book to see if it’s worth your time? That’s what head does for files.

It gently shows you the top 10 lines of the file without forcing you to scroll for days. Classy, right?

Need more or fewer lines?

Just 2 lines. Enough to understand the shopping list.

tail: The Gossip

tail is the nosy neighbour who only cares about what’s happening at the end. Perfect for checking logs or watching new info appear in real time.

Even better:

That -f means “follow” — as in, “I’ll sit here and live-stream this log file like it’s my Netflix.”

wc: The Bean Counter

wc stands for word count, but it's secretly a stats machine. It can tell you how many lines, words, and characters are in a file.

Need just the line count?

This is perfect for flexing: “I wrote 894 lines of config today.” Boom. Productivity.

Try This: Your Mini Linux Mission

Create a test file
Use head to view the first 3 lines
Use tail to check the last 2 lines
Use wc -l to count how many lines total
Misplace it and use find to save the day

Why This Stuff Matters

Each of these commands does a simple job — but together, they make you a smarter, faster Linux user.

Think of them like the tools in Batman’s utility belt. Alone? Useful. Together? Unstoppable.

And remember: reading tutorials is great — but typing the commands, messing around, and breaking stuff a little is how you really learn. File-fu takes practice.

So go explore, poke around, count some words, and tail some logs. Your terminal superpowers are growing by the day.