Recursive Find from Command Line
Probably a dozen times a day I need to search any given project for specific code keywords. Most of the time it's within a specific project but then there are times where I don't remember which directory or project the specific text is -- from my blog to my many Mozilla projects, I have code all over my local machine and it's oftentimes difficult to find something I need.
Most of the time I need to open my text editor and have it do the hard work of what I'm looking for but that's probably not efficient -- a more efficient tool would come from command line and thanks to CommandLineFu.com, I found the perfect command:
# Search all ".js" files for "debounce"
# Spits out file path, line number, and snippet where string appears
find . -name "*.js" -exec grep -in -H "debounce" {} \;
The command above searches files recursively to find the desired string, outputting the source file and the text which the string occurs in!
![From Webcam to Animated GIF: the Secret Behind chat.meatspac.es!]()
My team mate Edna Piranha is not only an awesome hacker; she's also a fantastic philosopher! Communication and online interactions is a subject that has kept her mind busy for a long time, and it has also resulted in a bunch of interesting experimental projects...
![Designing for Simplicity]()
Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...
![CSS Selection Styling]()
The goal of CSS is to allow styling of content and structure within a web page. We all know that, right? As CSS revisions arrive, we're provided more opportunity to control. One of the little known styling option available within the browser is text selection styling.
![Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis]()
Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...
Recently I’m using:
I think grep also has an option to filter on file extension too and I use it sometimes, but I don’t know it by heart.
The output on this looks pretty must the same as with the functionality already built into grep using the
-rand--includeflags. I also tend to add the-nflag to output the line numbers as well. I believe this should line be equivalent.https://vivekragunathan.wordpress.com/more-resources/cmd-line-sucks/
Everyday
grepThe find trick was one I learned at university in the 1990s, when most greps didn’t have the recursive flag. My vague recollection is that GNU grep introducing -r gave much of the competition a bit of a kick up the arse, and now it’s fairly common, but the find trick is still useful on older or more obscure Unix platforms…
Pretty sure you have a typo in there. “*.[js]” means “*.j” or “*.s”, which is likely to find nothing.
Good point — left some testing in there. Updated!
Check out Ack (http://beyondgrep.com/why-ack/).
Oh, you were filtering for JavaScript files only. That’s as easy as
:-)
Wasn’t able to execute this through the command line:
Err find: missing argument to `-exec'https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher