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
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery Chosen Plugin

    Without a doubt, my least favorite form element is the SELECT element.  The element is almost unstylable, looks different across platforms, has had inconsistent value access, and disaster that is the result of multiple=true is, well, a disaster.  Needless to say, whenever a developer goes...

  • By
    Retrieve Your Gmail Emails Using PHP and IMAP

    Grabbing emails from your Gmail account using PHP is probably easier than you think. Armed with PHP and its IMAP extension, you can retrieve emails from your Gmail account in no time! Just for fun, I'll be using the MooTools Fx.Accordion plugin...

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!