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<!-- addedByLfdynahead ver 1.1 --><TABLE ALIGN="right" border=0><TR><TD ALIGN="right"><FONT SIZE="-1" FACE="Arial,Helvetica">This article is available in: <A href="../../English/September1998/article64.shtml">English</a> <A href="../../Castellano/September1998/article64.html">Castellano</a> <A href="../../Deutsch/September1998/article64.html">Deutsch</a> <A href="../../Francais/September1998/article64.html">Francais</a> <A href="../../Nederlands/September1998/article64.html">Nederlands</a> <A href="../../Portugues/September1998/article64.html">Portugues</a> <A href="../../Russian/September1998/article64.html">Russian</a> <A href="../../Turkce/September1998/article64.html">Turkce</a> <A href="../../Korean/September1998/article64.html">Korean</a> </FONT></TD></TR></TABLE><br>
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<img src="../../common/images/Guido-S.gif" alt=
"[Photo of the Author]" height="164" width="173">
<BR>by Guido Socher <br> <small><guido(at)bearix.oche.de></small>
<BR><BR>
<I>About the author:</I><BR>
Guido loves linux because it is a free system and it is also a
lot of fun to work with people from the Linux community all
over the world. He spends his spare time with his girl-friend,
listens to BBC World Service radio, rides his bike through the
countryside and enjoys playing with Linux.
<!-- TRANSLATED TO en -->
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<BR><i>Content</i>:
<UL>
<LI><A HREF="#64lfindex0">Finding files by name</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="#64lfindex1">Getting an overview over the file system</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="#64lfindex2">Finding files by content (searching for text strings in
files)</A></LI>
</UL>
</TD></TR></TABLE>
<!-- HEAD OF THE ARTICLE -->
<br>
<H2>Finding files</H2>
<img src="../../common/images/illustration3.gif" alt=
"[Illustration]" hspace="10" height="100" width="100">
<!-- ABSTRACT OF THE ARTICLE -->
<P><i>Abstract</i>:
<P>
This aricle gives an introduction on how to find files by name
and by content.
</P>
<HR size="2" noshade align="right"><BR>
<!-- BODY OF THE ARTICLE -->
<A NAME="64lfindex0"> </A>
<H2>Finding files by name</H2>
<p>Probably you can remember this problem: You had some kind of
file and you can't remember where you put it.</p>
<p>This is where the <tt>find</tt> command comes handy. How to
use it? <tt>find</tt> comes of course with a large man page but
let's just look at some "normal cases". To traverse the
directory tree starting with the current directory and search
for a file named lostfile.txt:</p>
<br clear="all">
<p class="code">
find . -name lostfile.txt -print
</p>
<p><tt>find</tt> takes also wild cards. Remember to quote the
wild-cards otherwise the shell tries to expand them before they
get handed over to find. Here is an example:</p>
<p class="code">
find . -name "lost*" -print
</p>
<p>This command can be quite slow when you need to search in a
large directory tree. Here the <tt>locate</tt> command can
help. It does not really search directly for a file in the file
system. It searches a database. This is a lot faster but the
database might be out of date. In some distributions the
<tt>located</tt> database is updated every night but you can of
course run the <tt>updatedb</tt> command manually from time to
time in order to update the database. <tt>locate</tt> does
substring searches.</p>
<p class="code">
locate lostfile</p>
<p>This will locate the files lostfile.txt or mylostfile.txt
etc...</p>
<p>So far we were searching for files where we knew quite
exactly what the file name was. Maybe the file name was not
<i>lostfile.txt</i> but <i>lastfile.txt</i> or
<i>leastfile.txt</i> or <i>lostfiles.txt</i> or
<i>Lotsfile.txt</i> or <i>lostfile.text</i> and you can't
remember the name exactly. How can you still find the file? In
this case you could use a fault tolerant file find utility
called ftff. ftff searches for the file and allows for a number
of "spelling errors". This command would find all these
slightly "misspelled" file names:</p>
<p class="code">
ftff lostfiles.txt</p>
<p>The number of allowed spelling errors depends on the file
length of the file but can also be set with the -t option. To
allow a maximum of 2 errors and use also a wild-card just
type:</p>
<p class="code">ftff -t2 "lostfiles*"</p>
<p>Ftff is a program of my own design and is part of a package
called whichman-1.5 that can be downloaded from</p>
<a href=
"http://linuxfocus.org/~guido/">linuxfocus.org/~guido/</a>
<p>Some times you would like to find all files in the directory
tree that do not contain a certain string. For example all
files except .o and .c. Here are a couple of possibilities to
do it:</p>
<p class="code">find . ! -name "*.o" ! -name "*.c" -print<br>
find . -print | fgrep -v '.o' | fgrep -v '.c'<br><br>
if you have the the gnu version of find: <br>
find | fgrep -v '.o' | fgrep -v '.c'<br>
find | egrep -v '\.[oc]'
</p>
<A NAME="64lfindex1"> </A>
<H2>Getting an overview over the file system</H2>
<p>Sometimes you would like to get an overview about the file
system in front of you. E.g. you get a new CD and would like to
see what's on it. You could just use <i>ls -R</i>. Personally I
prefer for readability one of the following. tree ( <a href=
"ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/file/">sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/file/tree-1.2.tgz</a>
) draws a tree diagram.</p>
<p class="code">tree<br><br>
or with long file names: <br>
tree -fF</p>
<p>Then there is of course the good old find. The gnu version
of find, which comes usually with Linux, has also the
possibility to change the print format to print e.g the file
size with the name:</p>
<p class="code">find . -ls<br>
find . -print<br><br>
or with gnu find: <br>
find<br>
find . -printf "%7s %p\n"</p>
<p>There is also a small perl wrapper around the ls command
that does similar things. It can be downloaded <a href=
"../../common/src/lsperl.gz">here: lsperl.gz</a>. You can
probably find much more file viewing tools but this is for most
cases more than sufficient.</p>
<A NAME="64lfindex2"> </A>
<H2>Finding files by content (searching for text strings in
files)</H2>
<p>The standard utilities for searching text strings in files
are grep/egrep for regular expression searches and fgrep to
search for literal strings. To search for an expression in all
files in the current directory just type:</p>
<p class="code">egrep -i "search expression" *</p>
<p>To search for strings in all files down the directory tree
you can combine the find or other file name search commands
with e.g egrep. This can be done in several ways:</p>
<p class="code">egrep -i "expression" `find . -type f -print`<br>
find . -type f -exec egrep -i "expression" /dev/null {} \;<br>
find . -type f -print | xargs egrep -i "expression"</p>
<p>If you find this hard to remember then you can just use a
small shell script downloadable form <a href=
"../../common/src/grepfind.gz">here: grepfind.gz</a>. The
script makes also sure that non-printable characters are
removed in case you egrep accidentally through a binary
file.</p>
<p>A very interesting search program is agrep. agrep works
basically like egrep but does fault tolerant searches. This way
you can also find slightly mis-spelled words. To search for an
expression and allow for a maximum of 2 spelling errors you
use:</p>
<p class="code">agrep -i -2 "search exprission" *</p>
<p>The agrep program can be downloaded form sunsite <a href=
"ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/text/agrep-2.04.tar.Z">sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/text/agrep-2.04.tar.Z</a>
or the original site <a href=
"ftp://ftp.cs.arizona.edu/agrep/">ftp://ftp.cs.arizona.edu/agrep/</a></p>
<p>Then there is also <tt>glimpse</tt>. glimpse is a very
powerful search utility. It uses a concept similar to locate.
First a database needs to be build, but then searches are very
fast. To build a search index for the contents of all files
starting from the current directory:</p>
<p class="code">glimpseindex .</p>
<p>After that you can search for a string in all files that
were previously indexed</p>
<p class="code">glimpse -i -2 "search exprission"</p>
<p>glimpse is also fault tolerant (as agrep) and the -2 allows
for two errors. glimpse is available from <a href=
"http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/">http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/</a></p>
<hr noshade>
<p>There are many search utilities available for Unix and Linux
especially. This article can be by no means complete. If you
are interested in more tricks and utilities like this then have
a look at the .lsm files under <a href=
"ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils">http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils</a></p>
<p>Have fun, happy searching.</p>
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<tr><td><font size="2">en --> -- : Guido Socher <small><guido(at)bearix.oche.de></small></font></td></tr>
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<p><font size=1>2002-10-20, generated by lfparser version 2.32</font></p>
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