What is the best way to ignore vim temporary files when doing a search with grep?
grep --exclude=*~
I believe that should work.
I find Ack to be a drop in replacement for my grepping needs. No need to worry about excluding a bunch of file types or directories by default. You can always setup an .ackrc file in order to add more file types or alter ack's default behavior.
You haven't said this but I suspect that you're grepping through a directory tree.
This may not be the most elegant solution but you might use the output of 'find'.
I often find myself recursively grepping a directory tree like this:
grep <needle> `find . \( -name '*.cpp' -o -name '*.h' \) -print`
You could certainly do something like:
grep <needle> `find . \! -name '.??*swp' -print`
Related
I want to search an expression say "abcd" in all files of a directory but exclude some file of a certain type in my search
like
grep -rn 'abcd' *
But the result should not include expression found in files with extensions .js and .h. How will I do that?
use the --exclude option
grep 'your string here' -r --exclude=\*.{js,h}
So, at this point I typically advise to use ack, which is like grep, but has a lot of built-in features like file type selection.
But with grep, and a bit of shell magic, this can work:
find -not -iname '*.h' -not -iname '*.js' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -rn 'abcd'
I'm trying to find files with specific extensions.
For example, I want to find all .pdf and .jpg files that's named Robert
I know I can do this command
$ find . -name '*.h' -o -name '*.cpp'
but I need to specify the name of the file itself besides the extensions.
I just want to see if there's a possible way to avoid writing the file name again and over again
Thank you !
My preference:
find . -name '*.jpg' -o -name '*.png' -print | grep Robert
Using find's -regex argument:
find . -regex '.*/Robert\.\(h\|cpp\)$'
Or just using -name:
find . -name 'Robert.*' -a \( -name '*.cpp' -o -name '*.h' \)
find -name "*Robert*" \( -name "*.pdf" -o -name "*.jpg" \)
The -o repreents an OR condition and you can add as many as you wish within the braces. So this says to find all files containing the word "Robert" anywhere in their names and whose names end in either "pdf" or "jpg".
As an alternative to using -regex option on find, since the question is labeled bash, you can use the brace expansion mechanism:
eval find . -false "-o -name Robert".{jpg,pdf}
This q/a shows how to use find with regular expression: How to use regex with find command?
Pattern could be something like
'^Robert\\.\\(h|cgg\\)$'
As a script you can use:
find "${2:-.}" -iregex ".*${1:-Robert}\.\(h\|cpp\)$" -print
save it as findcc
chmod 755 findcc
and use it as
findcc [name] [[search_direcory]]
e.g.
findcc # default name 'Robert' and directory .
findcc Joe # default directory '.'
findcc Joe /somewhere # no defaults
note you cant use
findcc /some/where #eg without the name...
also as alternative, you can use
find "$1" -print | grep "$#"
and
findcc directory grep_options
like
findcc . -P '/Robert\.(h|cpp)$'
Using bash globbing (if find is not a must)
ls Robert.{pdf,jpg}
Recurisvely with ls: (-al for include hidden folders)
ftype="jpg"
ls -1R *.${ftype} 2> /dev/null
For finding the files in system using the files database:
locate -e --regex "\.(h|cpp)$"
Make sure locate package is installed i.e. mlocate
I am successfully using find to create a list of all files in the current subdirectory, excluding those in the subdirectory "cache." Here's my first bit of code:
find . -wholename './cach*' -prune -o -print
I now wish to pipe this into a grep command. It seems like that should be simple:
find . -wholename './cach*' -prune -o -print | xargs grep -r -R -i "samson"
... but this is returning results that are mostly from the cache directory. I've tried removing the xargs reference, but that does what you'd expect, running the grep on text of the file names, rather than on the files themselves. My goal is to find "samson" in any files that aren't cached content.
I'll probably get around this issue by just using doubled greps in this instance, but I'm very curious about why this one-liner behaves this way. I'd love to hear thoughts on a way to modify it while still using these two commands (as there are speed advantages to doing it this way).
(This is in CentOS 5, btw.)
The wholename match may be the reason why it's still including "cache" files. If you're executing the find command in the directory that contains the "cache" folder, it should work. If not, try changing it to -name '*cache*' instead.
Also, you do not need the -r or -R for your grep, that tells it to recurse through directories - but you're testing individual files.
You can update your command using the piped version, or a single-command:
find . -name '*cache*' -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 grep -il "samson"
or
find . -name '*cache*' -prune -o -exec grep -iq "samson" {} \; -print
Note, the -l in the first command tells grep to "list the file" and not the line(s) that match. The -q in the second does the same; it tells grep to respond quietly so find will then just print the filename.
You've told grep itself to recurse (twice! -r and -R are synonyms). Since one of the arguments you're passing is . (the top directory), grep is searching in every file (some of them twice, or even more if they're in subdirectories).
If you're going to use find and grep, do this:
find . -path './cach*' -prune -o -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i "samson"
Using -print0 and -0 makes your script work even with file names that contain spaces or punctuation characters.
However, you probably don't need to bother with find here, since GNU grep is capable of excluding directories:
grep -R --exclude-dir='cach*' -i "samson" .
(This also excludes ./deeply/nested/directory/cache. If you only want to exclude cache directories at the toplevel, use find as you did.)
Use the -exec option on find instead of piping them to another command. From there you can use grep "samson" {} \; to look for samson in each file listed.
For example:
find . -wholename './cach*' -prune -o -exec grep "samson" "{}" +
There are some folder that contains space, and as a result, those folders can not be indexed using cscope.
Can i ask you for help to solve this,or any suggestion.
thanks
Julius
Thanks for your reply.
My steps to use cscope like the following
find . -name '*.scala'>cscope.files
cscope -b
at this step. i see the message indicates that can not find file:
cscope: cannot find file /work/project/copy
cscope: cannot find file of
cscope: cannot find file fp/src/main/jav....
Actually copy of fp is a folder.so i think cscope can not recognize the folder contains space.
I encountered this problem when i tried to use vim with cscope.maybe i need move this question to other tag.
You can do it simply using GNU find at least, you can use the -printf or -fprintf options for that:
find . -type f -fprintf cscope.files '"%p"\n'
pydave's answer is very slow. This way took 0.10s where pydave's answer took 14s:
find . -name "*.scala" | awk '{print "\""$0"\""}' > cscope.files
You can use find's -exec to force quotes around your output:
find . -name "*.scala" -exec echo \"{}\" \; > cscope.files
You might need to mess around with quoting/escaping if you're doing this from a script.
Double quoting the files names works in cygwin, where as escaping with backslash does not.
$ find $PWD -name "*.scala" | sed -e 's/^/"/g' -e 's/$/"/g' > cscope.files
I have had to do this several times, usually when trying to find in what files a variable or a function is used.
I remember using xargs with grep in the past to do this, but I am wondering if there are any easier ways.
grep -r REGEX .
Replace . with whatever directory you want to search from.
The portable method* of doing this is
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep pattern
-print0 tells find to use ASCII nuls as the separator and -0 tells xargs the same thing. If you don't use them you will get errors on files and directories that contain spaces in their names.
* as opposed to grep -r, grep -R, or grep --recursive which only work on some machines.
This is one of the cases for which I've started using ack (http://petdance.com/ack/) in lieu of grep. From the site, you can get instructions to install it as a Perl CPAN component, or you can get a self-contained version that can be installed without dealing with dependencies.
Besides the fact that it defaults to recursive searching, it allows you to use Perl-strength regular expressions, use regex's to choose files to search, etc. It has an impressive list of options. I recommend visiting the site and checking it out. I've found it extremely easy to use, and there are tips for integrating it with vi(m), emacs, and even TextMate if you use that.
If you're looking for a string match, use
fgrep -r pattern .
which is faster than using grep.
More about the subject here: http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/grep.1.asp
grep -r if you're using GNU grep, which comes with most Linux distros.
On most UNIXes it's not installed by default so try this instead:
find . -type f | xargs grep regex
If you use the zsh shell you can use
grep REGEX **/*
or
grep REGEX **/*.java
This can run out of steam if there are too many matching files.
The canonical way though is to use find with exec.
find . -name '*.java' -exec grep REGEX {} \;
or
find . -type f -exec grep REGEX {} \;
The 'type f' bit just means type of file and will match all files.
I suggest changing the answer to:
grep REGEX -r .
The -r switch doesn't indicate regular expression. It tells grep to recurse into the directory provided.
This is a great way to find the exact expression recursively with one or more file types:
find . \\( -name '\''*.java'\'' -o -name '\''*.xml'\'' \\) | xargs egrep
(internal single quotes)
Where
-name '\''*.<filetype>'\'' -o
(again single quotes here)
is repeated in the parenthesis ( ) for how many more filetypes you want to add to your recursive search
an alias looks like this in bash
alias fnd='find . \\( -name '\''*.java'\'' -o -name '\''*.xml'\'' \\) | xargs egrep'