friendly-find

friendly-find is the friendly file finder.

It's meant to be a more usable replacement for find(1). If you've used ack, then ffind is to find as ack is to grep.

Currently it's still in a prototype stage. Most things work, with the following notable exceptions:

• Time filtering is unimplemented.
• SVN ignores aren't parsed.
• It's pretty slow (though pruning VCS data directories saves lots of time).

Feedback is welcome, though remember that it's still a prototype, and is opinionated software.

• Mercurial: http://hg.stevelosh.com/friendly-find/
• Git: http://github.com/sjl/friendly-find/
• Documentation: http://github.com/sjl/friendly-find/#usage
• Issues: http://github.com/sjl/friendly-find/issues/
• License: GPLv3 (see notes)

Installation

If you're on OS X you can use Homebrew:

brew install ffind

Or you can install manually:

1. Copy the ffind to your computer somehow.
2. Make it executable.
3. Get it into your path somehow.

Usage

There's a half-assed man page generated from help2man, but ffind --help is probably easier to read.

Command Line Program

Usage: ffind [options] PATTERN

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             print the version and exit
  -d DIR, --dir=DIR     root the search in DIR (default .)
  -D N, --depth=N       search at most N directories deep (default 25)
  -f, --follow          follow symlinked directories and search their contents
  -F, --no-follow       don't follow symlinked directories (default)
  -0, --print0          separate matches with a null byte in output
  -l, --literal         force literal search, even if it looks like a regex
  -v, --invert          invert match
  -e, --entire          match PATTERN against the entire path string
  -E, --non-entire      match PATTERN against only the filenames (default)
  -p, --full-path       print the file's full path
  -P, --relative-path   print the file's relative path (default)

  Configuring Case Sensitivity:
    -s, --case-sensitive
                        case sensitive matching (default)
    -i, --case-insensitive
                        case insensitive matching
    -S, --case-smart    smart case matching (sensitive if any uppercase chars
                        are in the pattern, insensitive otherwise)

  Configuring Ignoring:
    -b, --binary        allow binary files (default)
    -B, --no-binary     ignore binary files
    -r, --restricted    restricted search (skip VCS directories, parse all
                        ignore files) (default)
    -q, --semi-restricted
                        semi-restricted search (don't parse VCS ignore files,
                        but still skip VCS directories and parse .ffignore)
    -u, --unrestricted  unrestricted search (don't parse ignore files, but
                        still skip VCS directories)
    -a, --all           don't ignore anything (ALL files can match)
    -I PATTERN, --ignore=PATTERN
                        add a pattern to be ignored (can be given multiple
                        times)

  Size Filtering:
    Sizes can be given as a number followed by a prefix.  Some examples:
    1k, 5kb, 1.5gb, 2g, 1024b

    --larger-than=SIZE  match files larger than SIZE (inclusive)
    --smaller-than=SIZE
                        match files smaller than SIZE (inclusive)

  Type Filtering:
    Possible types are a (all), f (files), d (dirs), r (real), s
    (symlinked), e (real files), c (real dirs), x (symlinked files), y
    (symlinked dirs). If multiple types are given they will be unioned
    together:  --type 'es' would match real files and all symlinks.

    -t TYPE(S), --type=TYPE(S)
                        match only specific types of things (files, dirs, non-
                        symlinks, symlinks)

.ffignore file format

The .ffignore file is a file containing lines with patterns to ignore, with a few exceptions:

• Blank lines and whitespace-only are skipped. If you want to ignore files whose names consist of only whitespace use a regex. Or reconsider what got you there in the first place.
• Lines beginning with a # are comments and are skipped. There can be whitespace before the # as well.
• Lines of the form syntax: (literal|regex) change the mode of the lines following them, much like Mercurial's ignore file format. The default is regex mode.
• All other lines are treated as patterns to ignore.

All patterns are unrooted, and search the full path from the directory you're searching in. Use a regex with ^ if you want to root them.

For example:

foo.*bar

Will ignore:

./foobar.txt
./foohello/world/bar.txt

License

Copyright 2016 Steve Losh and contributors.

Licensed under version 3 of the GPL.

Remember that you can use GPL'ed software through their command line interfaces without any license-related restrictions. ffind's command line interface is the only stable one, so it's the only one you should ever be using anyway. The license doesn't affect you unless you're:

• Trying to copy the code and release a non-GPL'ed version of ffind.
• Trying to use it as a Python module from other Python code (for your own sanity I urge you to not do this) and release the result under a non-GPL license.