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:

Copy the ffind to your computer somehow.
Make it executable.
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

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.

sjl/friendly-find

sjl

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