findany

A command-line utility that retains only those lines from a text file or standard input that contain at least one substring from a list.

Features

• Search for multiple substrings. It is designed for efficient matching of millions of substrings.
• Reads from standard input or a text file.
• Writes filtered lines to standard output or redirects them to a text file.
• Optional case-insensitive search.
• Optional inversion of search.
• Optionally prints only the first matched substring instead of the entire line (incompatible with inverted search).
• Supports binary files.
• Progress bar to show search progress when processing large files, if the output is redirected to a file.
• Runs on Windows and Linux.

Installation

Option 1: Use npm

npm i -g findany

Option 2: Use pip

pip install findany

On Windows, make sure the /Scripts directory is added to PATH.

Option 3: Download binary

1. Download the latest release from the Releases page.
2. Save it to any folder (e.g. /usr/local/bin/ or C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\), add that folder to the PATH variable.
3. Make executable if needed (chmod +x /usr/local/bin/findany).

Build

The program is written in C and can be compiled with gcc. It is recommended to enable SSE4.1 for low-level optimizations.

gcc -msse4.1 ./src/findany.c -o findany -O3

Test

Functional tests are configured using YAML files and run with pytest.

cd ./test && python -m pytest ./test.py

Usage

findany [OPTIONS] [SUBSTRINGS] [FILE]

Options

• -i, --case-insensitive: Perform a case-insensitive search. By default, searches are case-sensitive.
• -v, --invert: Search for lines that contain none of the specified substrings.
• -o, --output OUTPUT: Redirect the output to OUTPUT instead of printing to standard output. It enables a progress-bar.
• -s, --substring SUBSTRING: Receive a substring from a command-line argument instead of a file. It can be used multiple times. Must not be used together with the SUBSTRINGS argument.
• -h, --help: Display the help message and exit.

Arguments

• SUBSTRINGS: A file containing substrings to search for. Each line in this file represents a substring to search for.
• FILE: The file to search in. If not provided, standard input will be used.

Example

1. Search in a file for any of the substrings specified in substrings.txt and write the matching lines to output.txt:

findany -o output.txt substrings.txt input.txt

2. Case-insensitive search for substrings:

findany -i substrings.txt input.txt

3. Read from standard input and write to standard output:

cat input.txt | findany substrings.txt > output.txt

4. Read from standard input, write to standard output, pass two substrings via command-line arguments:

findany -s mySubstring -s otherSubstring < input.txt > output.txt

More examples are available in the test cases folder.

License

This program is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See the LICENSE file for more details.