fe, the iron searcher

It's like ack or ag, but leverages find(1) and grep(1).

I wrote this primarily because I wanted something whose workings I understood.

If you need to find Ferrous Bueller in your files, this is your utility.

There are others.

• ack
• ag - the Silver Searcher
• ast-grep
• cgrep
• git grep
• glark
• grab
• greple
• grin
• paragrep
• pss - an ack clone
• pt - the Platinum Searcher
• qgrep
• rak - an ack clone
• rg - ripgrep
• rga - ripgrep, but also searches PDFs, ebooks, Office documents, .zip and .tar.gz files, and more.
• sift
• spot
• ucg - UniversalCodeGrep
• ugrep

There is also good ole' grep.

• -I excludes binary files.
• -r recurses into subdirectories without following symlinks.
  • If you want to follow symlinks, a potentially bad idea, specify -R.
• You probably also want to specify:
  • --exclude-dir=node_modules
  • --exclude-dir=.git
• You may want:
  • --exclude=\*.pdf
  • --exclude=\*.doc
  • --exclude=\*.xls
  • --exclude=\*.ppt

Manpages

• gnu grep
• FreeBSD grep
• OpenBSD grep
• Linux grep(1)

Tool Lists

• https://beyondgrep.com/more-tools/
• https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#quick-examples-comparing-tools

What do fegrep and fefind do, exactly?

• They are pretty heavy front-ends to grep and find.

• It handles file and directory exclusions better.

• It has built-in common pattern searches such as --non-ascii and --css-class.

• The ability to allow otherwise excluded file and directory patterns

What's wrong with heavy front-ends?

• To pass along options to grep, you have to specify each one individually.