Have You Found Your File?

When I need to find a file it’s normally when I am in Vim and I’ll happly use Ctrl P. However, there are tasks outside of Vim that require my attention daily and I have found the following tips and tricks to listing and finding files very usefull.

Of course, everyone knows what ls is, for those who don’t we’ll take a moment to weep for their souls… ls has more power to it than you may know. For instance, if you use ls -t it provides a list of files ordered by most recently modified.

$ ls -t | head

2014-10-03-have-you-found-your-file.markdown

2014-09-30-raise-in-ruby-is-just-a-method.markdown

2014-09-28-testing-against-multiple-rails-versions.markdown

2014-09-27-visiting-south-cumberland-state-park.markdown

2014-09-20-password-required-gem.markdown

2014-09-21-love-visiting-the-farm.markdown

2014-09-23-bash-tips-and-tricks.markdown

2014-09-18-ctags-are-the-bomb.markdown

2014-09-16-fast-active-record-setup.markdown

2014-03-19-mumble-bot-with-ruby.markdown

The real powerhouse of file finding is aptly named find. If you do any kind of command line work this is a command you should know how to harness the power of. My favorite of these is the -name option, which matches files like bash would.

$ find -name '*.markdown' | sort

./CHANGELOG.markdown

./README.markdown

./source/_posts/2013-11-20-let-me-start-this-up.markdown

# ...

Want a ls version of that find? No problem dude

$ find -name '*.markdown' -ls | sort -k 11

3805915    4 -rw-r--r--   1 bfalk    bfalk        1303 Mar  7  2014 ./CHANGELOG.markdown

3805918    4 -rw-r--r--   1 bfalk    bfalk        2901 Mar  7  2014 ./README.markdown

4856703    4 -rw-r--r--   1 bfalk    bfalk         388 Mar  7  2014 ./source/_posts/2013-11-20-let-me-start-this-up.markdown

4856704    4 -rw-r--r--   1 bfalk    bfalk        1203 Mar  7  2014 ./source/_posts/2013-11-21-las-vegas-ruby-users-group.markdown

4856705    4 -rw-r--r--   1 bfalk    bfalk        1232 Mar  7  2014 ./source/_posts/2013-11-22-image-scraping-my-wedding-photos.markdown

# ...

sort is also a powerful ally for just about everything command, in this case the sort -k 11 is sorting the 11th column, which is the default of ls, but you could very easily sort by any other column.

Other noteble features of find

  • -mtime – Find files edited before or after a certain time, for instance -mtime -2 would list all files edited in the last two days while -mtime +2 would list all files that haven’t been edited in the last two days
  • -newer <file> finds all files more recently modified than <file>
  • -exec run a command against each file, for instance find -name '*.rb' -exec flog {} \; will run flog for every ruby file

There are a ton more uses for find but these are the ones I use on a daily basis. I suggest trying them out and crack open the man pages to discover new features you might find useful!

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