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Tool docs

Unix searching tools

Search tools

find

Searches in the real system

Example:

find /home/username/ -name "*.err"

Find files and directories:

find -type f -or -type d

Syntax:

find options starting/path expression
  • Slower than locate, but has more options
  • Traverser all directories in search for the pattern
  • The default configuration for find will ignore symbolic links (shortcut files). If you want find to follow and return symbolic links, you can add the -L option to the command, as shown in the example above.
  • find optimizes its filtering strategy to increase performance. Three user-selectable optimization levels are specified as -O1, -O2, and -O3.

Use find with grep

Combine find file search with greps pattern search

Example:

find . -type f -exec grep "example" '{}' \; -print

locate

Faster but not as powerful as find

  • locate simply looks its database and reports the file location

grep

Search for specific term in file

Example: grep This test.txt -> Every line containing the word ‘This’

  • Use regular expressions to get the most out of it!

Text processors

Ability to remove, add and modify the text as well

awk

Used for data extraction & reporting

Example:

$ sed -i 's/cat/dog/' file.txt
# this will replace any occurrence of the characters 'cat' by 'dog'
  • Make changes to a file with the help of regular expressions

sed

Stream editor

Example:

$ awk '{print $2}' file.txt
# this will print the second column of file.txt

fd instead of find

If the -x/—exec option is specified alongside a command template, a job pool will be created for executing commands in parallel for each discovered path as the input. The syntax for generating commands is similar to that of GNU Parallel:

  • {}: A placeholder token that will be replaced with the path of the search result (documents/images/party.jpg).
  • {.}: Like {}, but without the file extension (documents/images/party).
  • {/}: A placeholder that will be replaced by the basename of the search result (party.jpg).
  • {//}: Uses the parent of the discovered path (documents/images).
  • {/.}: Uses the basename, with the extension removed (party).

Examples

# Convert all jpg files to png files:
fd -e jpg -x convert {} {.}.png

# Unpack all zip files (if no placeholder is given, the path is appended):
fd -e zip -x unzip

# Convert all flac files into opus files:
fd -e flac -x ffmpeg -i {} -c:a libopus {.}.opus

# Count the number of lines in Rust files (the command template can be terminated with ';'):
fd -x wc -l \; -e rs

rg/fzf instead of grep

rg

fzf

  • fzf will launch interactive finder, read the list from STDIN, and write the selected item to STDOUT: find * -type f | fzf > selected

  • Using the finder

    • CTRL-J / CTRL-K (or CTRL-N / CTRL-P) to move cursor up & down

Resources