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 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It." Can you blame us though? We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...
![Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos]()
David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...
![Image Reflections with CSS]()
Image reflection is a great way to subtly spice up an image. The first method of creating these reflections was baking them right into the images themselves. Within the past few years, we've introduced JavaScript strategies and CANVAS alternatives to achieve image reflections without...
![MooTools Zebra Table Plugin]()
I released my first MooTools class over a year ago. It was a really minimalistic approach to zebra tables and a great first class to write. I took some time to update and improve the class.
The XHTML
You may have as many tables as...
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