friendly-find
friendly-find is the friendly file finder.
It's meant to be a more usable replacement for find(1). If you've used ack, then ffind is to find as ack is to grep.
Currently it's still in a prototype stage. Most things work, with the following notable exceptions:
- Time filtering is unimplemented.
- SVN ignores aren't parsed.
- It's pretty slow (though pruning VCS data directories saves lots of time).
Feedback is welcome, though remember that it's still a prototype, and is opinionated software.
- Mercurial: http://bitbucket.org/sjl/friendly-find/
- Git: http://github.com/sjl/friendly-find/
- Documentation: http://github.com/sjl/friendly-find/#usage
- Issues: http://github.com/sjl/friendly-find/issues/
- License: GPLv3 (see notes)
Installation
If you're on OS X you can use Homebrew:
brew install ffind
Or you can install manually:
- Copy the
ffindto your computer somehow. - Make it executable.
- Get it into your path somehow.
Usage
There's a half-assed man page generated from help2man, but ffind --help is
probably easier to read.
Command Line Program
Usage: ffind [options] PATTERN Options: -h, --help show this help message and exit --version print the version and exit -d DIR, --dir=DIR root the search in DIR (default .) -D N, --depth=N search at most N directories deep (default 25) -f, --follow follow symlinked directories and search their contents -F, --no-follow don't follow symlinked directories (default) -0, --print0 separate matches with a null byte in output -l, --literal force literal search, even if it looks like a regex -v, --invert invert match -e, --entire match PATTERN against the entire path string -E, --non-entire match PATTERN against only the filenames (default) -p, --full-path print the file's full path -P, --relative-path print the file's relative path (default) Configuring Case Sensitivity: -s, --case-sensitive case sensitive matching (default) -i, --case-insensitive case insensitive matching -S, --case-smart smart case matching (sensitive if any uppercase chars are in the pattern, insensitive otherwise) Configuring Ignoring: -b, --binary allow binary files (default) -B, --no-binary ignore binary files -r, --restricted restricted search (skip VCS directories, parse all ignore files) (default) -q, --semi-restricted semi-restricted search (don't parse VCS ignore files, but still skip VCS directories and parse .ffignore) -u, --unrestricted unrestricted search (don't parse ignore files, but still skip VCS directories) -a, --all don't ignore anything (ALL files can match) -I PATTERN, --ignore=PATTERN add a pattern to be ignored (can be given multiple times) Size Filtering: Sizes can be given as a number followed by a prefix. Some examples: 1k, 5kb, 1.5gb, 2g, 1024b --larger-than=SIZE match files larger than SIZE (inclusive) --smaller-than=SIZE match files smaller than SIZE (inclusive) Type Filtering: Possible types are a (all), f (files), d (dirs), r (real), s (symlinked), e (real files), c (real dirs), x (symlinked files), y (symlinked dirs). If multiple types are given they will be unioned together: --type 'es' would match real files and all symlinks. -t TYPE(S), --type=TYPE(S) match only specific types of things (files, dirs, non- symlinks, symlinks)
.ffignore file format
The .ffignore file is a file containing lines with patterns to ignore, with
a few exceptions:
- Blank lines and whitespace-only are skipped. If you want to ignore files whose names consist of only whitespace use a regex. Or reconsider what got you there in the first place.
- Lines beginning with a
#are comments and are skipped. There can be whitespace before the#as well. - Lines of the form
syntax: (literal|regex)change the mode of the lines following them, much like Mercurial's ignore file format. The default is regex mode. - All other lines are treated as patterns to ignore.
All patterns are unrooted, and search the full path from the directory you're
searching in. Use a regex with ^ if you want to root them.
For example:
foo.*bar
Will ignore:
./foobar.txt ./foohello/world/bar.txt
License
Copyright 2016 Steve Losh and contributors.
Licensed under version 3 of the GPL.
Remember that you can use GPL'ed software through their command line interfaces
without any license-related restrictions. ffind's command line interface is
the only stable one, so it's the only one you should ever be using anyway. The
license doesn't affect you unless you're:
- Trying to copy the code and release a non-GPL'ed version of
ffind. - Trying to use it as a Python module from other Python code (for your own sanity I urge you to not do this) and release the result under a non-GPL license.