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://hg.stevelosh.com/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)
If you're on OS X you can use Homebrew:
brew install ffind
Or you can install manually:
- Copy the
ffind
to your computer somehow. - Make it executable.
- Get it into your path somehow.
There's a half-assed man page generated from help2man
, but ffind --help
is
probably easier to read.
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)
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
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.