locate and grep command

If I wanted to locate all filenames that contain the word "emacs" would this be right?

locate *emacs*

Also how would I combine this with grep to avoid displaying all filenames containing the world "lib"?

you can try this

ls -l | grep "*emacs*"
or
ls -l | grep "\*emacs\*"

I am not too sure of which bcos i am not in front of a unix machine at the moment. as to how not to select with the word "lib" i have no idea.

find . -name *emacs* |grep -v lib

The find command work work recursively from the current directory. If you don't want to search current directory, replace . with the directory you want to search.

thong_yw please note: on *nix
ls -l | grep "*emacs*"
or
ls -l | grep "\*emacs\*"
AND
ls -l ¦ grep emacs
GIVE all the same result! save (useless && confusing) keystrokes
btw: why -l in ls ?

bingotailspin
you need quotes around *emacs* in find
and if you anyway use find¦grep, this is also a version:
find . ¦ grep emacs |grep -v lib

Basil_Fawlty
'locate' is not a standard Unix tool, i dont believe it supports '*'
the unix cmd are: 'which' (and 'type' on ksh) used to LOCATE
filenames in $PATH

my suggestion

find .¦ sed -n '/lib/d;/emacs/p'
have fun

One more problem with locate is that it uses a database rather than searching the directories for a file. Also, the database it uses is updated by a cron job (runs daily on some distros of linux and weekly on openbsd). Thus, it is possible to delete a file and locate will still claim that it exists, since its database hasn't been updated yet.

I would use find because it looks in all directories, not just the directories in the path.