Search for files & file names using silver searcher - command-line

Using Silver Searcher, how can I search for:
(non-binary) files with a word or pattern AND
all filenames, with a word or pattern including filenames of binary files.
Other preferences: would like to have case insensitive search and search through dotfiles.
Tried to alias using this without much luck:
alias search="ag -g $1 --smart-case --hidden && ag --smart-case --hidden $1"

According to the man page of ag
-G --file-search-regex PATTERN
Only search files whose names match PATTERN.
You can use the -G option to perform searches on files matching a pattern.
So, to answer your question:
root#apache107:~/rpm-4.12.0.1# ag -G cpio.c size
rpm2cpio.c
21: off_t payload_size;
73: /* Retrieve payload size and compression type. */
76: payload_size = headerGetNumber(h, RPMTAG_LONGARCHIVESIZE);
the above command searches for the word size in all files that matches the pattern cpio.c
Reference:
man page of ag version 0.28.0
Note 1:
If you are looking for a string in certain file types, say all C sources code, there is an undocumented feature in ag to help you quickly restrict searches to certain file types.
The commands below both look for foo in all php files:
find . -name \*.php -exec grep foo {}
ag --php foo
While find + grep looks for all .php files, the --php switch in the ag command actually looks for the following file extensions:
.php .phpt .php3 .php4 .php5 .phtml
You can use --cpp for C++ source files, --hh for .h files, --js for JavaScript etc etc. A full list can be found here

Try this:
find . | ag "/.*SEARCHTERM[^/]*$"
The command find . will list all files.
We pipe the output of that to the command ag "/.*SEARCHTERM[^/]*$", which matches SEARCHTERM if it's in the filename, and not just the full path.

Try adding this to your aliases file. Tested with zsh but should work with bash. The problem you encountered in your example is that bash aliases can't take parameters, so you have to first define a function to use the parameter(s) and then assign your alias to that function.
searchfunction() {
echo $(ag -g $1 --hidden)
echo $(ag --hidden -l $1)
}
alias search=searchfunction
You could modify this example to suit your purpose in a few ways, eg
add/remove the -l flag depending on whether or not you want text results to show the text match or just the filename
add headers to separate text results and filename results
deduplicate results to account for files that match both on filename and text, etc.
[Edit: removed unnecessary --smart-case flag per Pablo Bianchi's comment]

Found this question looking for the same answer myself. It doesn't seem like ag has any native capability to search file and directory names. The answers above from Zach Fogg and Jikku Jose both work, but piping find . can be very slow if you're working in a big directory.
I'd recommend using find directly, which is much faster than piping it through ag:
Linux (GNU version of find)
find -name [pattern]
OSX (BSD version of find)
find [pattern]
If you need more help with find, this guide from Digital Ocean is pretty good. I include this because the man pages for find are outrageously dense if you just want to figure out basic usage.

To add to the previous answers, you can use an "Or" Regular Expression to search within files matching different file extensions.
For example to just search a string in C++ header files [.hpp] and Makefiles [.mk] ) :
ag -G '.*\.(hpp|mk)' my_string_to_search

After being unsatisfied with mdfind, find, locate, and other attempts, the following worked for me. It uses tree to get the initial list of files, ag to filter out directories, and then awk to print the matching files themselves.
I wound up using tree because it was more (and more easily) configurable than the other solutions I tried and is fast.
This is a fish function:
function ff --description 'Find files matching given string'
tree . --prune --matchdirs -P "*$argv*" -I "webpack" -i -f --ignore-case -p |
ag '\[[^d].*' |
awk '{print $2}'
end
This gives output similar to the following:
~/temp/hello_world $ ff controller
./app/controllers/application_controller.rb
./config/initializers/application_controller_renderer.rb
~/temp/hello_world $

Related

OracleSolaris 11.2 - ctags and vi

On a freshly installed OracleSolaris I have ctags from base-developer-utilities package. It doesn't support recursive, so I generate tags as follows:
% cd my_sources; rm -f tags; touch tags
% find . -name '*.c' -o -name '*.h' -exec ctags -v -u {} \;
The tags get generated, but for some reason vim is unable to understand it, i.e. it just doesn't see any tags although I added them with set tags, instead reports error E426: tag not found.
The tag is in tags file.
Does anybody have a clue what possibly can be wrong with it? Thanks.
If vi complains that the tag isn't there, then it's because it probably isn't. You could confirm that by opening the tags file with a text editor and search for it.
But the reason why it isn't there is because you are overwriting the contents of the tags file for each file find encounters, so it should only contain the tags of the last file. To overcome this you can add the -a argument, which is available according to its man page.
As an alternative you can try compiling a more recent ctags from source in order to use the recursive mode with the -R --languages=c arguments. If you decide to compile from source, I suggest that you use universal-ctags.

How to split frontend and backend translations?

I have a web project (php+js) translated by gettext. Later it was only translated at server side, pushing translations to JS by varying weird ways. Now i converted it to all gettext, convert my .po files by po2json and load them into Jed library. But this way I load all translations, even never used on client !
What i want to do now:
xgettext -js-options *.js > js-empty.po
xgettext -php-options *.php > php-empty.po
magic both-translated.po js-empty.po > js-translated.po
magic both-translated.po php-empty.po > php-translated.po
What should i use as 'magic' ?
P.S. I will be doing actual translation in one file and then split just for optimization, on every build.
I have found the solution:
msgcomm both-translated.po js-empty.po -o js-translated.po
Visual inspection confirms what lines are translated, and the following command confirms what number of 'msgid' is equal in empty and translated files:
grep msgid $1 | wc -l
Adding more value to answer: where's well recommended Python library https://pypi.python.org/pypi/polib, or in main Linux distributions, packages 'python3-polib' or 'python-polib'. I was considering using it to perform the task and maybe will use in future for other gettext-related tasks.

Using grep in eshell on NTemacs

I have been trying to do a recursive grep command on files in sub folders using grep in NTemacs and Cygwin. So far the "best" results have been using grep in eshell. When I use this:
grep "t" -r *
I get a list of all file names containing the letter t, in all sub folders one layer down but notthing else. In Cygwin i get nothing. I'm working on a directroy that is not in the Cygwin install. Don't know if that mather or not.
What I want is to match the content of a more complex string in all files (and not just the file names, but the content). And in all sub directories.
I would like to use eshell from emacs but I'm open to suggestions, apart form using LINUX. This is a work PC and I don't want to do all the setup of a LINUX install.
i just wrote a very similar answer to another question, but i suspect it's the same root problem:
my first thought is that your files have windows line endings (CRLF) as opposed to unix/linux line endings (LF), and that is messing with grep's ability to parse the file. try running this:
dos2unix filename
on each file you need to search then try your grep statement again.
if you need to convert many files across several directories, i suggest using dos2unix with the -exec action of find:
find . -exec dos2unix {} \;
(add whatever other options you need to find before running that, of course)

How do I do a recursive find & replace within an SVN checkout?

How do I find and replace every occurrence of:
foo
with
bar
in every text file under the /my/test/dir/ directory tree (recursive find/replace).
BUT I want to be able to do it safely within an SVN checkout and not touch anything inside the .svn directories
Similar to this but now with the SVN restriction: Awk/Sed: How to do a recursive find/replace of a string?
There are several possiblities:
Using find:
Using find to create a list of all files, and then piping them to sed or the equivalent, as suggested in the answer you reference, is fairly straightforward, and only requires scanning through the files once.
You'd use one of the same answers as from the question you referenced, but adding -path '*/.svn' -prune -o after the find . in order to prune out the SVN directories. See this question for a discussion of using the prune option with find -- although note that they've got the pattern wrong. Thus, to print out all the files, you would use:
find . -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -print
Then, you can pipe that into an xargs call or whatever to do the individual replacements, as suggested in the question you referenced. There is a lot of discussion there about different options, which I won't reproduce here, although I prefer the version from John Zwinck's answer:
find . -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
Using recursive grep:
If you have a system with GNU grep, you can use that to find the list of files as well. This is probably less efficient than find, but it does allow you to only call sed on the files that match, and I personally find the syntax a lot easier to remember (or figure out from manpages):
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' `grep -l -R --exclude-dir='*/.svn' 'foo' .`
The -l option causes grep to only output the list of file names, rather than the matching lines.
Using a GUI editor:
Alternately, if you're using windows, do what I do -- get a copy of the NoteTab editor (available in a free version), and use its search-and-replace-on-disk command, which ignores hidden .svn directories automatically and just works.
Edit: Corrected find pattern to */.svn instead of .svn, added more details and some other possibilities. However, this depends on your platform and svn version: .svn without */ may be required in some cases, like on CentOS 7.
How about this?
grep -i "search_string" `find "*.some_extension"`
That is halfway solution to finding a search_string within files that have a specific extension....once you know the files that has the string, can be easily modified by piping it into sed....

using grep and find commands - basic questions to help me sort it out in my simple mind

I am back with a second no-brainer question, but I would like to get this straight in my head.
I have an assignment in which I am charged with providing a command to find a file named test in my home directory (one command using find, and one using grep). I understand that using find is just 'find ~/test', but using grep, wouldn't I have to search out a pattern within the file 'test'? Or is there a way to search for the file (using grep), even if the file is empty?
ls ~ | grep test
I understand that using find is just 'find ~/test'
No. find ~/test will also have a match for every file or directory under the directory $HOME/test/. Rather use find ~ -type f -name test.
The assignment sounds unclear. But yes, if you give any filenames to grep, it will look at the contents of the files and ignore the names of the files. Perhaps you can grep the output of another command? Maybe ls as #Reese suggested, or maybe a different find command.
ls -R ~ | grep test
Explanation: ls -R ~ will recursively list all files and directories in your home folder. grep test will narrow down that list to files (and directories) that have "test" in their name.