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!
![Being a Dev Dad]()
I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...
![Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools]()
MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does. Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up. I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own. In any event...
![Better Pull Quotes with MooTools]()
Chris Coyier authored a post titled Better Pull Quotes: Don't Repeat Markup a while back. In his post he created great-looking pull quotes without repeating any content -- instead he uses jQuery to dynamically create the pull quotes. The following is the...
![Fix Anchor URLs Using MooTools 1.2]()
The administrative control panel I build for my customers features FCKEditor, a powerful WYSIWYG editor that allows the customer to add links, bold text, create ordered lists, and so on. I provide training and documentation to the customers but many times they simply forget to...
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