``findx``, an extended ``find`` command.
Project description
Overview
findx is an extended version of the Unix find command written in the Python language as a wrapper around find and other Unix tools. find is a very powerful tool, but by itself there are a large number of arguments required for a typical invocation. findx provides convenient shortcuts for invoking find without so much typing.
As a quick example, imagine using find, xargs and grep to search through a tree of files. A simple invocation might be:
find -type f | xargs grep PATTERN
But the above invocation won’t correctly handle file with spaces or unusual characters; handling that grows the command to:
find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep PATTERN
Filenames are handled correctly now, but the command probably searches through some uninteresting files. It also misses on a couple of boundary cases. You’d probably like to include xargs --no-run-if-empty to ensure grep isn’t invoked when no files are found; you might want to follow symbolic links as well as files; and you might want to skip over .git directories (for example). Adding those into the above command grows things considerably:
find -L -name .git -prune -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty grep PATTERN
After excluding additional files and directories and perhaps adding --color=auto to the grep invocation, things are getting out of hand. findx exists to make such invocations simpler. First, findx knows about the need for -print0 and xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty; using : implies all of the standard protocol for using xargs correctly, reducing the above to:
findx -L -name .git -prune -o -type f : grep PATTERN
Standard paths to ignore are requested via -stdx:
findx -L -stdx -type f : grep PATTERN
Following symlinks to files and producing only files is another common requirement; the switch -ffx implies finding files (following symlinks) while excluding a predefined set of directories and files:
findx -ffx : grep PATTERN
Piping filenames into grep is such a common pattern that the -ffg switch is the same as -ffx : grep, reducing things to:
findx -ffg PATTERN
In addition, ffx and ffg are to additional entry points into findx that reduce things even further:
ffx = findx -ffx ffg = findx -ffg
In the most common case, searching a file tree thus reduces to:
ffg PATTERN
See findx --help or read the top of findx.py for more details.
Installation
From PyPI, installation is the usual:
pip install findx
From the source tree, install via:
python setup.py install
Running the tests
Install any development requirements:
pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
Run tests via pytest:
pytest
Changes
See CHANGES.rst for a history of changes.
License
findx is distributed under the terms of the MIT license; see LICENSE.rst for details.
Project details
Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
Download files
Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.