Removes the special meaning of the character that follows it. This works even in character classes. This is not the case for locate . Slash characters have no special significance in the shell pattern matching that find and locate do, unlike in the shell, in which wildcards do not match them. Links There are two ways that files can be linked together.
Symbolic links are a special type of file whose contents are a portion of the name of another file.
See section Shell Pattern Matching , for details about the pattern argument. Dereference symbolic links. To find hard links, first get the inode number of the file whose links you want to find. Doing this saves needless searching, since hard links to a file must be on the same filesystem. See section Filesystems .