which

Using the shell’s which command will allow you to search files accessible via your environment path to determine if they already exist.

Copy to Clipboard

whereis

The whereis command can be used to search a broader set of system directories independently of your environmental search path.

Copy to Clipboard

locate

Another tool which utilizes a database can be used to search a pre-compiled list of filenames on the file system.

This is the locate command.

To install you can perform an apt install plocate and initialize the database with the sudo updatedb command.

Copy to Clipboard