I prefer to seach with locate command but I don't know how to perform a partial search with it.
Suppose I want to search file containing the word libevent. How can I do that?
Locate searches for file names. Not file contents.
The ugly way is to use grep It'll start searching from / directory.
grep -irn 'libevent' /
The better way is to narrow down the suspected directories where this files could exists. Suppose those directories' full paths are /path/to/dir1, /path/to/dir2 etc. Then invoke the following command.
for dir in /path/to/dir1 /path/to/dir2
do
grep -irn 'libevent' $dir
done
The locate command is not searching inside the content of files like grep (and other commands) do. It is simply searching inside file paths.
locate work by using a cache index of file paths, and this index is often updated by the updatedb utility.
addenda
A useful way to search some pattern inside (the content of) some files is to use the ability of zsh or some recent versions of bash to expand the ** file pattern, like e.g.
grep foo ~/gee/**/*.[ch]
with zsh this search inside all files named *.c or *.h under $HOME/gee/ containing foo. I find this feature tremendously useful, and justifying alone the adoption of zsh as my interactive shell. With other shells you might type the much longer
find $HOME/gee -name '*.ch' | xargs grep foo
Related
This command is slow: find / -name 'program.c' 2>/dev/null
1) Any faster alternatives?
2) Is there an alternative to the above command to search for a file within a specific nested directory (but not the entire system)?
The first / in your command is the base directory from which find will begin searching. You can specify any directory you like, so if you know, for example, that program.c is somewhere in your home directory you could do find ~ -name 'program.c' or if it's in, say, /usr/src do find /usr/src -name 'program.c'
That should help with both 1 and 2.
If you want a command that's not find that can be faster you can check out the mlocate stuff. If you've done a recent updatedb (or had cron do it for you overnight) you can do locate <pattern> and it will show you everywhere that matches that pattern in a file/directory name, and that's usually quite fast.
For fast searching, you probably want locate
It is usually setup to do a daily scan of the filesystem, and index the files.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/locate
although locate & updatedb is for the whole system, the search usually is faster.
I have looked and tried to use exuberant ctags with no luck with what I want to do. I am on a Mac trying to work in a project where I want to exclude such directories as .git, node_modules, test, etc. When I try something like ctags -R --exclude=[.git, node_modules, test] I get nothing in return. I really only need to have it run in my core directory. Any ideas on how to accomplish this?
The --exclude option does not expect a list of files. According to ctags's man page, "This option may be specified as many times as desired." So, it's like this:
ctags -R --exclude=.git --exclude=node_modules --exclude=test
Read The Fantastic Manual should always be the first step of any attempt to solve a problem.
From $ man ctags:
--exclude=[pattern]
Add pattern to a list of excluded files and directories. This option may
be specified as many times as desired. For each file name considered by
both the complete path (e.g. some/path/base.ext) and the base name (e.g.
base.ext) of the file, thus allowing patterns which match a given file
name irrespective of its path, or match only a specific path. If appro-
priate support is available from the runtime library of your C compiler,
then pattern may contain the usual shell wildcards (not regular expres-
sions) common on Unix (be sure to quote the option parameter to protect
the wildcards from being expanded by the shell before being passed to
ctags; also be aware that wildcards can match the slash character, '/').
You can determine if shell wildcards are available on your platform by
examining the output of the --version option, which will include "+wild-
cards" in the compiled feature list; otherwise, pattern is matched
against file names using a simple textual comparison.
If pattern begins with the character '#', then the rest of the string is
interpreted as a file name from which to read exclusion patterns, one per
line. If pattern is empty, the list of excluded patterns is cleared.
Note that at program startup, the default exclude list contains "EIFGEN",
"SCCS", "RCS", and "CVS", which are names of directories for which it is
generally not desirable to descend while processing the --recurse option.
From the two first sentences you get:
$ ctags -R --exclude=dir1 --exclude=dir2 --exclude=dir3 .
which may be a bit verbose but that's what aliases and mappings and so on are for. As an alternative, you get this from the second paragraph:
$ ctags -R --exclude=#.ctagsignore .
with the following in .ctagsignore:
dir1
dir2
dir3
which works out to excluding those 3 directories without as much typing.
You can encapsulate a comma separated list with curly braces to handle multiples with one --exclude option:
ctags -R --exclude={folder1,folder2,folder3}
This appears to only work for folders in the root of where you're issuing the command. Excluding nested folders requires a separate --exclude option.
The other answers were straight to the point, and I thought a little example may help:
You should add an asterisk unix-like style to exclude the whole directory.
ctags -R --exclude={.git/*,.env/*,.idea/*} ./
A bit late but following on romainl response, you could use your .gitignore file as a basis, you only need to remove any leading slashes from the file, like so:
sed "s/\///" .gitignore > .ctagsignore
ctags -R --exclude=#.ctagsignore
I really only need to have it run in my core directory.
Simply remove the -R (recursion) flag!!!
Presently i am using linux(Fedora 15) and i ma trying to search a folder in the entire file system like with below command
find / -name "apache-tomcat*"
The execution of the above command is taking more and more time that a user cant wait and results are some thing like below
[root#user fedrik]# find / -name "apache-tomcat*"
find: `/proc/6236/task/6236/ns/net': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/task/6236/ns/uts': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/task/6236/ns/ipc': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/ns/net': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/ns/uts': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6236/ns/ipc': No such file or directory
find: `/proc/6462/task/6462/ns/net': No such file or directory
.................
.................
But as i have mentioned it is taking long time to process and sometimes it is been strucked, so can anyone please let me know on how to search a particular folder by name with a command from linux terminal that will be very fast and should search in the entire file system like above i used '/'
Edit
Actually my intention is to search the folder something like apache-tomcat-7.0.37 in the entire filesystem,
for example there may be many folders like apache-tomcat-6.0.45, apache-tomcat-5.1.7, apache-tomcat-5.0.37........... on different locations on filesystem
So as we can observe only the last part(which is numerical part) is changing and the entire folder name is same, so is there a way to search for these kind of folders irrespective of the last numerical part , like by using regular expression or somethingl ike that.
Finally my intention is to find the folders of the format apache-tomcat-xxxxxxx on the entire file system, because if we search for just apache-tomcat we will get hundreds of results and even thousands too sometimes which is difficult to analyze and search from them
?
Try this:
locate apache-tomcat
It uses a database (updated by the hilariously-named updatedb, which you can run with sudo updatedb to refresh the search index).
locate apache-tomcat | grep -E '^apache-tomcat-[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+$'
or just use [0-9] instead of [[:digit:]]. That's probably more readable. Or
locate apache-tomcat | perl -ne 'print if /^apache-tomcat-\d+\.\d+\.\d+$/'
Whatever you do, you definitely want to use locate instead of find, as it will be much faster.
I have a big code repository for a project and I'm trying to make it searchable via emacs TAGS. So I go into the main directory and I try using this command to generate the tags:
find . -name *.[chsS] | xargs etags -
However I get the response "find: No match."
When I just type the "find" command on its own, it lists all the code files and subdirectories with more code files that I wish to tag.
How can I make this work? Just to make clear, I want to be able to use the emacs M-. and M-* to navigate around code tags in a big repository.
Greatly appreciated.
I call shannanigans on your claim that this works:
find . -name *.[chsS]
Here, your interactive shell would expand "*.[chsS]" into a list of files, and the first one would be accepted as the "name" parameter. But find will try to interpret the second file as an option, and it won't be valid.
The lesson here is to quote wildcards passed to find either with single-quotes, double-quotes, or backslash.
For C and header files using ctags tool,
find . -name \*.[ch] | xargs ctags
This command will include the source file with extension .c and .h
If you use ctags developed at https://ctags.io
ctags --languages=C,Asm --kinds-C=+p -e -R
may generate TAGS file.
I primarily program in Linux, using tcsh shell. By default, my current directory is the root of my code base - I use "find" to locate whichever file I'm interested in modifying, and then once find shows up the location of the file, I can then edit/modify on Vim.
The problem is, due to the size of the code base, every time I ask find to show up the location of a file , it takes at least 4-5 seconds to complete the search, which are too short to be used for anything else !! So, since the rate is new files being added to the code base is very small, i'm looking for a way as follows:
1) Generate the list of all files in my code base
2) Have find look in only those locations/files to answer my query
I've seen how opening up files in cscope is lightning fast, as it stores the list of files previously. I'd like to use the same mechanism for find, just not from within the cscope window, but from the generic cmd line.
Any ideas ?
Install the locate, mlocate, or slocate package from your distribution, and either wait for cron to run the update task :) or run the updatedb command manually via the /etc/cron.daily/mlocate or similar file.
$ time locate kernel.txt
/home/sarnold/Local/linux-2.6/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
/home/sarnold/Local/linux-2.6-config-all/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
/home/sarnold/Local/linux-apparmor/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
/usr/share/doc/libfuse2/kernel.txt.gz
real 0m0.595s
Yes. See slocate (or updatedb & locate).
The -U flag is particularily interesting because you can just index the directory that contains your code (and thus, updating or creating the database will be quick).
You could write a list of directories to a file and use them in your find command:
$ find /path/to/src -type d > dirs
$ find $(cat dirs) -type f -name "foo"
Alternatively, write a list of files to a file and use grep on it. The list of files is more likely to change than the list of dirs though.
$ find /path/to/src -type f > files
$ vi $(grep foo files)
find in conjunction with xargs (substituting -exec) does differ significantly in execution timings:
http://forrestrunning.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/find-exec-xargs/