I always need to find either a file by filename or a file with certain string in it. I stopped using IDEs for development, so searching from the command line is my preferred way of finding things. Here are my two search commands from .search file in my .files repo.
Find file with given filename
Should be case insensitive, accept parts of the filename and find files by modified time. Under Unix I use the following command:
function f() {
find . -iname "$1"
}
f foo*.js finds foo.js, foo-bar.js, etc
f f??.js finds foo.js
You can also easily find files newer than certain time period by adding
-newerct 'period' argument
f foo*.js -newerct '1 month ago'
finds files created less than 1 month ago
If you need more power, for example to find files older than certain period, or by size, etc, take a look at the find command and find examples
Search inside files
To find files with given content, I use an alias to grep Prints filename, line number and the line itself with the found match.
alias fin="grep -in -ri \
--exclude-dir=.git \
--exclude-dir=node_modules \
--exclude-dir=bower_components \
--exclude-dir=dist"
To find all files with string "foobar" in folder "src"
fin "foobar" "src"
You can use regular expressions, for example fin "fo.bar" "src".
Open sublime at the found location
I love using Sublime, and when my find command finds a match, I can open sublime at the specific line. For example if I search for "sublime" in my blog posts, I get the following
$ fin sublime source/_posts
source/_posts/2-shell-search-commands.md:56:## Open sublime at the found location
source/_posts/2-shell-search-commands.md:58:I love using Sublime, and when my find command finds
source/_posts/2-shell-search-commands.md:59:For example if I search for "sublime" in
source/_posts/git-aliases.md:20:a lightweight text editor like *Notepad2* or *Sublime*
source/_posts/git-branches-with-descriptions.md:19:try another. For me Sublime does not work in this case,
...
I can open the desired location using command subl source/_posts/git-aliases.md:20 and the Sublime text
editor will understand the line number after the colon.
Open all found files in sublime
What if I want to open all found files in sublime? I can output just the filenames from grep using -l option.
$ fin -l sublime source/_posts
source/_posts/2-shell-search-commands.md
source/_posts/git-aliases.md
source/_posts/git-branches-with-descriptions.md
...
Notice that grep -l is smart enough to merge all filenames to a set. I can call sublime on each line
using xargs command
$ fin -l sublime source/_posts | xargs subl
All text files that contain word "sublime" will be opened as tabs.
Update 1 - silver search
I have tried the_silver_searcher
and it is super fast and uses .<ignore> file patterns to search only the real files!
Update 2 - reverse search
In Bash, when you have a lot of commands in the history, you can find a command by typing
part of it. Hit Ctrl+r to start reverse search and start typing part of the command.
Hit Ctrl+r to cycle through matching commands.
Also a tip: since # is a comment delimiter in Bash if you want to "label" a command
type it as command #label then you can quickly find it using Ctrl+r #label.
Update 3 - Git history search for a file
Imagine you have a file in a Git history that has been deleted. To find all the commits that touched it:
1 | git log --all --full-history -- <filename> |
You can use wildcards in the filename. For example to find a file in a subfolder without knowing the exact extension
1 | git log --all --full-history -- **/<filename.*> |
Example: find deleted file
1 | $ md test-git-history |