PyLocate

A simple command line tool to help you find files even within zip archives.

Installation

You can install pylocate with the following command:

pip install pylocate

or for the bleeding edge (although they will usually be the same):

pip install git+https://github.com/ilovetux/pylocate.git

Who is this for?

PyLocate is for anyone who needs to find files on their filesystem by name. It is especially useful if you need to search within zip files.

The functionality is loosely based on the well-known linux command locate, but it does not use a db for caching which can be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your particular use case. This results in slightly slower performance, but also does not require you to run sudo updatedb before issuing the pylocate command.

This is also Python friendly, as well as the command line tool which is the feature pylocate was designed for, there is also a Python memory-efficient generator pylocate.locate which powers the CLI so has all the advantages but does not need to be shelled out. This is useful if you are writing a program which might use many different data files and would like the ability to search through a local directory.

Features

• PyLocate can search through zip files, just add the -z, --examine-zips flag, and the zip file will be treated just like a directory.
• PyLocate can accept many locations to look through, just keep adding -d, --directory arguments to add locations to look through.
• Match on multiple patterns, if you would like to search for all .py files as well as all .md files, just add them like so pylocate -p *.py -p *.md
• Optionally only match on all patterns, suppose you want to find all *.py files which have locate in the name you can do so like this pylocate -p *.py -p *locate*
• PyLocate operates on glob patterns so just pass in what the filename should look like and it should work.
• PyLocate can also use regular expressions to search for files, simply specify the -e, --regex flag and your patterns.
• PyLocate also provides a memory-efficient python generator for use within your own programs.

How it works

The operation is simple, we simply recurse through the provided directories using os.walk then we look at the filenames in each directory. We use Python's fnmatch.fnmatch for the filename matching by default, unless the regex flag is provided in which case we compile the regular expression(s) and use the regular expression objects search() method to perform the match. When a match is found, we use print to display the filename.

If -z, --examine-zips is specified, we use Python's zipfile.ZipFile.namelist() to simply grab the names of the files within the zip file.

All of this functionality is provided by one Python generator, so it is easy to use within your own programs. If you use it this way there is a 1:1 correspondence between the command line options and the parameters to the function. The functionality is the same except that results are yield ed instead of print ed.

Contributing

I welcome all types of contributions even simple complaints. Please go to the issue tracker to open a bug report, feature request or complaint. If you would like to submit a pull-request go right ahead, chances are that I will thank you and include it right there on the spot, but I might cherry-pick or ask for some improvements such as a test case.

Get the code

You can get a copy of the code with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/ilovetux/pylocate

Run the tests

You can run the tests with the following command:

python setup.py nosetests

Getting help

Please feel free to open an issue with any questions or comments you might have, I will try my best to answer the same day.