[bash] Find file in directory from command line

In editors/ides such as eclipse and textmate, there are shortcuts to quickly find a particular file in a project directory.

Is there a similar tool to do full path completion on filenames within a directory (recursively), in bash or other shell?

I have projects with alot of directories, and deep ones at that (sigh, java). Hitting tab in the shell only cycles thru files in the immediate directory, thats not enough =/

If you're looking to do something with a list of files, you can use find combined with the bash $() construct (better than backticks since it's allowed to nest).

for example, say you're at the top level of your project directory and you want a list of all C files starting with "btree". The command:

find . -type f -name 'btree*.c'

will return a list of them. But this doesn't really help with doing something with them.

So, let's further assume you want to search all those file for the string "ERROR" or edit them all. You can execute one of:

grep ERROR $(find . -type f -name 'btree*.c')
vi $(find . -type f -name 'btree*.c')

to do this.

Yes, bash has filename completion mechanisms. I don't use them myself (too lazy to learn, and I don't find it necessary often enough to make it urgent), but the basic mechanism is to type the first few characters, and then a tab; this will extend the name as far as it can (perhaps not at all) as long as the name is unambiguous. There are a boatload of Emacs-style commands related to completion in the good ol' man page.

http://content.hccfl.edu/pollock/Unix/FindCmd.htm

The linux/unix "find" command.

When I was in the UNIX world (using tcsh (sigh...)), I used to have all sorts of "find" aliases/scripts setup for searching for files. I think the default "find" syntax is a little clunky, so I used to have aliases/scripts to pipe "find . -print" into grep, which allows you to use regular expressions for searching:

# finds all .java files starting in current directory
find . -print | grep '\.java'

#finds all .java files whose name contains "Message"
find . -print | grep '.*Message.*\.java'

Of course, the above examples can be done with plain-old find, but if you have a more specific search, grep can help quite a bit. This works pretty well, unless "find . -print" has too many directories to recurse through... then it gets pretty slow. (for example, you wouldn't want to do this starting in root "/")

locate <file_pattern>

*** find will certainly work, and can target specific directories. However, this command is slower than the locate command. On a Linux OS, each morning a database is constructed that contains a list of all directory and files, and the locate command efficiently searches this database, so if you want to do a search for files that weren't created today, this would be the fastest way to accomplish such a task.

I use ls -R, piped to grep like this:

$ ls -R | grep -i "pattern"

where -R means recursively list all the files, and -i means case-insensitive. Finally, the patter could be something like this: "std*.h" or "^io" (anything that starts with "io" in the file name)

I use this script to quickly find files across directories in a project. I have found it works great and takes advantage of Vim's autocomplete by opening up and closing an new buffer for the search. It also smartly completes as much as possible for you so you can usually just type a character or two and open the file across any directory in your project. I started using it specifically because of a Java project and it has saved me a lot of time. You just build the cache once when you start your editing session by typing :FC (directory names). You can also just use . to get the current directory and all subdirectories. After that you just type :FF (or FS to open up a new split) and it will open up a new buffer to select the file you want. After you select the file the temp buffer closes and you are inside the requested file and can start editing. In addition, here is another link on Stack Overflow that may help.