Find file in directory from command line

Question

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

User · Answer

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

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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

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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

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http   content hccfl edu pollock Unix FindCmd htm  The linux unix  find  command

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find  root directory to search -name  filename      Directory is optional  defaults to cwd    Standard UNIX globbing is supported   See man find for more information   If you re using Vim  you can use    e    filename cpp   Or  tabn or any Vim command which accepts a filename

User · Answer

I use ls -R  piped to grep like this    ls -R   grep -i  quot pattern quot   where -R means recursively list all the files  and -i means case-insensitive  Finally  the patter could be something like this   quot std  h quot  or  quot  io quot   anything that starts with  quot io quot  in the file name

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

locate  lt file pattern gt       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

[bash] Find file in directory from command line

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