Recursive Find from Command Line

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools LazyLoad

    Once concept I'm very fond of is lazy loading. Lazy loading defers the loading of resources (usually images) until they are needed. Why load stuff you never need if you can prevent it, right? I've created LazyLoad, a customizable MooTools plugin that...

  • By
    Redacted Font

    Back when I created client websites, one of the many things that frustrated me was the initial design handoff.  It would always go like this: Work hard to incorporate client's ideas, dream up awesome design. Create said design, using Lorem Ipsum text Send initial design concept to the client...

Discussion

  1. Vladimir

    Recently I’m using:

    grep 'term' -r ./

    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.

  2. The output on this looks pretty must the same as with the functionality already built into grep using the -r and --include flags. I also tend to add the -n flag to output the line numbers as well. I believe this should line be equivalent.

    grep -rin --include="*.js" "debounce" .
  3. The 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…

  4. Jeremy

    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!

  5. Check out Ack (http://beyondgrep.com/why-ack/).

    ack debounce
    • Oh, you were filtering for JavaScript files only. That’s as easy as

      ack debounce --type=js

      :-)

  6. Isaiah

    Wasn’t able to execute this through the command line: Err find: missing argument to `-exec'

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!