Like most of the command line tools, find accepts wildcards as arguments.
In general, find is a more powerful utility, and locate is faster for everyday quick searches. The full range of possible searches would take a long time to explain; for more details , type info find, which will bring up the very thorough info pages on find and locate.
7.5 Determining a File’s Contents
Debian comes with a utility that can guess at the contents of a file for you. Although it is not 100% accurate, you can use the following command to explore your system:
$ file /bin/cp
You should see something like this:
/bin/cp: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 386, version 1
Skipping the technical parts, this is an executable file for Intel machines.
$ file /etc/init.d/boot
The preceding command gives this response: