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!
![5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About]()
CSS and JavaScript: the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release. They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely. We have our .js files and our .css, but...
![Write Better JavaScript with Promises]()
You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...
![MooTools Typewriter Effect Plugin]()
Last week, I read an article in which the author created a typewriter effect using the jQuery JavaScript framework. I was impressed with the idea and execution of the code so I decided to port the effect to MooTools. After about an hour of coding...
![MooTools TwitterGitter Plugin]()
Everyone loves Twitter. Everyone loves MooTools. That's why everyone should love TwitterGitter, a MooTools plugin that retrieves a user's recent tweets and allows the user to format them however the user would like. TwitterGitter allows the user to choose the number of...
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