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!
![fetch API]()
One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for. We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better. Our effort to...
![How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam]()
I love almost every part of being a tech blogger: learning, preaching, bantering, researching. The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe: dealing with SPAM comments. For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day. PER DAY. Bloating my database...
![MooTools History Plugin]()
One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads. Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes? It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth. Unfortunately...
![Custom Scrollbars in WebKit]()
Before each of the browser vendors we like was providing unique CSS controls, Internet Explorer was setting the tone. One such example is IE's early implementation of CSS filters. Internet Explorer was also the first browser that allowed developers to, for better or worse, customize...
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