Powershell script to locate specific file/file name?

From a powershell prompt, use the gci cmdlet (alias for Get-ChildItem) and -filter option:

gci -recurse -filter "hosts"

This will return an exact match to filename “hosts“.

SteveMustafa points out with current versions of powershell you can use the -File switch to give the following to recursively search for only files named “hosts” (and not directories or other miscellaneous file-system entities):

gci -recurse -filter "hosts" -File 

The commands may print many red error messages like “Access to the path 'C:\Windows\Prefetch' is denied.“.

If you want to avoid the error messages then set the -ErrorAction to be silent.

gci -recurse -filter "hosts" -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

An additional helper is that you can set the root to search from using -Path.
The resulting command to search explicitly search from, for example, the root of the C drive would be

gci -Recurse -Filter "hosts" -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Path "C:\"

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Hata!: SQLSTATE[HY000] [1045] Access denied for user 'divattrend_liink'@'localhost' (using password: YES)