I need to search my drive for about 200 passwords that could possibly be on my drive. Doing this one at a time is time consuming. I would like to find a tool that can accept a file, or a list of terms to incrementally search on.
Try using grep for Windows:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm
The command-line argument --file=<file> tells grep to look inside <file> for the strings to match. Full documentation here.
Related
The short version of the question: how can I get icicles to search usefully for files in directories and subdirectories, even if only given a partial match of the filename?
EDIT: The short answer is to use icicle-locate-file in the top level of your directory and use S-Tab (shift-tab) to begin completion rather than plain tab. More details in this answer.
Just as an addendum, I gave up on icicles after this as it took about 10 seconds to find files in the (large) directory tree in question each time I used icicle-locate-file. There may be a way round this delay, perhaps by creating and sets of files 'gathered' by icicles, but I began to feel that the potential benefits were being eroded by the up-front costs of working this out and by the costs of keeping the file sets updated. As the author of icicles points out below, access to *nix's locate command would allow me to use icicle-locate, which is quicker than icicle-locate-file. However, I run on Windows and the Everything utility doesn't work for me. So, back to copious use of IDO and bookmarks that expand to dired buffers.
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The longer version... As Emacs (24.3.1) is now my main development environment I have been exploring ways of improving my efficiency, particularly regarding filename completion for some time now. Several excellent answers to this question pointed me to ido-mode and dired-x, both of which I am now using.
Another great recommendation was Emacs' bookmarks. In particular, defining dired buffers as bookmarks and jumping to them using C-x r b mybook1 or even calling C-x r b from the C-x C-f minibuffer (this page was helpful) are two very useful strategies.
A couple of people mentioned anything and its successor helm. I have been unable to get the file location part of either package working on Windows 7. Apparently they depend on the command line version of Everything but this fails for me, as detailed in this question, to which there were some helpful responses but no definitive answers. It seems that it works smoothly on *nix but there's not much discussion of helm-locate etc on Windows. So that counts out helm and anything for filename completion.
Which brings me to icicles. In a question about making find-file search in subdirectories the asker commented that they had taken a look at "ido and icicles, but they seem to work shallowly, only within current directory".
In response to this came a comment on icicles: "you can search for any file on your system, if you want, matching any part of the file name and path" with a pointer to a page on Icicles file name input. While I appreciate the considerable effort that has gone the help pages for icicles, I didn't find this one very useful because it consisted largely of a list of descriptions of icicles functions. What would be useful to me is a tutorial that walks you through finding files.
Let's assume the following.
I am running a Windows 7 installation of Emacs 24.3.1.
I have a top-level directory containing some files and folders. In this case it is c:/iciclestest/.
I know there's a file somewhere in this section of the tree that has "grob" as part of the filename.
I want to use icicles to find this file. I have put (require 'icicles) and (icy-mode 1) in my init file.
So, off we go. Start Emacs in the scratch buffer. Hit C-x C-f. I get a File or directory prompt, with a purple plus sign to the left that I think indicates that this is one of icicles' multi-commands.
Hitting tab gets me this mini-frame, showing me the contents of the current directory.
I hit tab on the folder1 subdirectory and icicles shows me the contents of that, as one would expect.
You can see a couple of files with "grob" in the name.
Right, C-g to clear everything then C-x C-f again. Enter 'grob'. I get a "no prefix completions" message. This surprised me a little because I expected icicles to have some kind of whizzy fuzzy matching like ido-mode.
Okay, maybe I need a different command. Let's try M-x icicle-locate-file, which gives me this prompt:
If I enter 'grob' and hit confirm I just get a new file, as per below.
To recap: what I'd like to be able to do is enter a string and have icicles go and look for files or folders containing that string. My main dev folder has many dozens of directories and thousands of files so a quick find within Emacs would be a godsend.
I realise that the locate command doesn't exist on Windows so functionality will be in some ways limited, but I would have thought a recursive search of files and subdirs from the current dir based on a user-entered string would be straightforward. What am I missing? Am I going about this the right way? Can this be done in icicles?
You need to read the Icicles doc a bit more: use S-TAB instead of TAB for apropos (regexp or substring) completion. That is apparently all you want here: match grob as a substring. (No need for any fuzzy matching for that.)
Since you want files matching grob anywhere under that directory, use icicle-locate-file. Give it that directory as the starting point. (And since you want to match grob anywhere in the file name, use S-TAB for completion.)
Icicles does provide "whizzy fuzzy matching like ido-mode" (in fact a lot whizzier). Ido's "flex" matching is the same as Icicles's "scatter" matching.
You can set the kind of completion you want to be one of the fuzzy-matching types. In the minibuffer, C-( cycles among the prefix-completion methods. M-( cycles among the apropos-completion methods. True fuzzy matching is a prefix completion method. Flex/scatter matching is a poor man's fuzzy matching, and it is an apropos completion method (so use M-( to cycle to it). To change the default matching, so you need not cycle to get the ones you prefer, customize option icicle-S-TAB-completion-methods-alist or icicle-TAB-completion-methods.
In addition to the answer about icicle-locate-file, you can find files that are in marked Dired subdirectories, and their marked subdirectories, etc. recursively, using M-+ C-F (command icicle-visit-marked-file-of-content-recursive), if you use both Icicles and Dired+.
This answer provides the details.
I have a huge log file (25.3 million lines) with errors and I won't to search it without holding down the up button. How can you search this with vi? I've seen similar at directory levels but not particular files. At the moment I've searched a date e.g. /Tue 15 Jan
and navigated down but I'm not sure when problems may have began (only when noticed) so I need a general search.
My general idea from within the file would be /ORA-/!ORA-00020
meaning that I want to find those strings containing "ORA-" but ignoring those that are "ORA-00020". Any idea how this can be done viewing a particular file?
Thanks for any info
You do
grep -v "ORA\-00020" error.log > error2.log
then you search error2.log
I don't know the exactly way on vi, but we have kind of ways to get the result:
we can use cat/grep commands and write the answers in another file (so we have much smaller file) and then you can search in it, if it will be ok.
you can use vim instead vi and use TagList Vim Plugin.
Additional info at:
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/04/ctags-taglist-vi-vim-editor-as-sourece-code-browser/
http://vim-taglist.sourceforge.net/faq.html
Let's say you're working on a big project with multiple files, directories, and subdirectories. In one of these directories/subdirectories/files, you've defined a method, but now you want to know exactly which files in your entire project have been calling your method. How do you do this?
You mentioned grep so I'll throw this solution out there. A more robust solution would be to implement a version control system as Fibbe suggested.
find . -exec grep 'method_name' {} \; -print 2> /dev/null
The idea is, for each file that is found in the current directory and sub-directories, a grep for 'method_name' is executed on that file. The 2> /dev/null is nice if you don't want to get warned about all of the directories and files you don't have access to.
The most common way to do this is by using your editor. For example emacs can do this if you create a tag index with etags.
Source: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/html_node/etags.html
The you just types M-. and type the name of the function you want to visit and emacs will take you there.
I don't know what system or which editor you are using but most editors has a simular function.
If you don't use emacs an other good way to keep track of functions, and get a lots of other good features, is to use a versions control system. Like git, it provides really fast search.
If you don't use a version control system you may want to look at a program that is designed just for searching. Like OpenGrok.
Maybe is a often repeated question here, but i can't find anything similar with the search.
The point is that i like to use Emacs for my personal projects, usually very small applications using C or python, but i was wondering how to use it also for my work, in which we have project with about 10k files of source code, so is veeeery big (actually i am using source insight, that is very nice tool, but only for windows), questions are:
Searching: Which is the most convenient way to search a string within the whole project?
Navigating throught the function: I mean something like putting the cursor over a function, define, var, and going to the definition
Refactoring
Also if you have any experience with this and want to share your thoughts i will consider it highly interesting.
Br
The "traditional" way of navigating C source files is to use "etags" to make a file called TAGS, then use ALT-. to go to functions across files.
For searching for strings in files, I usually use "grep". You could make a shell script with all the directories you want to search or something if you get tired of typing them in each time.
My projects typically live in git, so I put this together to quickly search them:
;; There's something similar (but fancier) in vc-git.el: vc-git-grep
;; -I means don't search through binary files
(defcustom git-grep-switches "--extended-regexp -I -n --ignore-case"
"Switches to pass to `git grep'."
:type 'string)
(defun git-grep (command-args)
(interactive
(list (read-shell-command "Run git-grep (like this): "
(format "git grep %s -e "
git-grep-switches)
'git-grep-history)))
(let ((grep-use-null-device nil))
(grep command-args)))
There is also the Emacs Code Browser. It makes exploring projects a lot simpler. See here and here for more information.
Regarding searches in the whole project, I find extremely useful the rgrep command.
Also, imenu is quite handy to jump to a function definition in the same file.
These are my 2p.
look to EDE from CEDET - it provide base support for projects...
ECB is too heavyweight for my taste. I have had good results with xcscope. Needless to say it doesn't help too much with Python.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CScopeAndEmacs
In addition to using TAGS as others have mentioned, I find igrep and igrep-find very useful. There is also Emacs' built in grep and grep-find, but I find their interface more clumsy.
My standard search is:
M-x igrep-find some_regexp RET ~/work_area/*.cxx
Which will look for all *.cxx files under ~/work/area, and show results matching some_regexp. Like all the search utilities, it populates a compilation-like buffer you can navigate using C-x ` (aka M-x next-error).
There are many ways that Icicles can help with projects. Likewise, Bookmark+ and even Dired+.
These libraries can help you create, organize, and manage projects, wherever their files and directories might reside. And they can help you navigate and search in various ways.
Some of the features are unique -- quite different from other approaches. I could list some of the project support here, but this is the best place to start.
I'm not sure if fuzzy is the correct way to phrase this, so allow me to explain what I want to do.
Often times, I'm looking for files that I know are within a particular directory in my local SVN working copy, and I have an idea what directory they're in, but don't want to think of the precise path or there may be several copies of it in different branches. For example, suppose I want a file "eligibility.py" that I know is somewhere under a "trunk" directory and in a directory named "interface" below that.
It would be ideal if I could just type in something like this at the anything-for-files prompt:
trunk interface eligibility.py
Is there any way I can do something similar to this?
I figured it out. This functionality is included with anything-match-plugin.el.
I like 'ifind myself.
M-x ifind /path/to/trunk/eligibility.py
I like using file-cache and ido-find-file: http://sachachua.com/wp/2009/01/06/emacs-file-cache-and-ido/
In Icicles you can find files by matching not just the relative file name but any parts of the path. You can use substring, regexp, and fuzzy matching. You can AND together multiple search patterns (progressive completion). See multi-command icicle-locate-file.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_File-Name_Input
You also mentioned fuzzy file-name matching, but that wasn't what your description corresponds to. If you do want to also do fuzzy file-name completion of various sorts then see this:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Fuzzy_Completion