fu

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Find Unleashed

Fu is an intuitive alternative to the Unix command find. It mainly searches filenames, but some meta-information like file mode is supported as well. It can walk directories in parallel, resulting in substantial speedups for directories with thousands of files.

Index

• Installation
  • Platform support
• Usage
  • Examples
• TODO
• Contributing

Installation

Homebrew

brew tap kbrgl/fu https://github.com/kbrgl/fu.git
brew install fu

Or, if you want the latest version from git, run brew install with the --HEAD flag. This is equivalent to running go get, except you'll be able to upgrade through Homebrew.

go get

If you have Go installed, run

go get -u github.com/kbrgl/fu

If you don't, download the latest release and put it somewhere on your $PATH.

Platform support

Unix-based systems (macOS, Linux distros, *BSDs, etc.) are supported. I'm guessing Windows will work as well, although I haven't tried it out on a Windows machine yet.

Usage

usage: fu [<flags>] <query> [<paths>...]

Flags:
  -h, --help       Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and
                   --help-man).
  -f, --fuzzy      Use fuzzy search
  -r, --regexp     Use regexp-based search
  -a, --suffix     Use suffix-based search (short flag 'a' is short for for
                   'after')
  -b, --prefix     Use prefix-based search (short flag 'b' is short for
                   'before')
  -s, --substring  Use substring-based search allowing the query to be at any
                   position in the filename
  -d, --dir        Show only directories
  -m, --perm=PERM  Filter by Unix permissions
  -c, --parallel   Walk directories in parallel, may result in substantial
                   speedups for directories with many files
  -v, --version    Show application version.

Args:
  <query>    Search query
  [<paths>]  Paths to search

Path is current working directory by default, and the program uses exact filename matching by default.

Examples

The general usage pattern of fu is:

fu [<search modifiers>...] <query> [<paths>...]

Where the search modifiers may be any of the options specified in the usage.

The only thing that's actually necessary is the query. By default,

fu <query>

Will search under the current directory for files with the name .

Find all dotfiles in the home folder

fu -b . ~

Find all Python scripts in current dir

fu -a .py

Find files in current dir whose names start and end with 'a'

fu -r "^a.*a\$"

Fuzzy matching

fu -f pkg

Fuzzy search is the algorithm that Sublime Text and Atom use in their Command Palettes. For an explanation, check out this Wikipedia article.

TODO

• Write tests for matchers
• Break up the main function into small, testable functions
• Beautify TTY output somehow (colorization or something)
• Find a way to estimate how much time a search will take, and print this estimate before performing the search. (I'm not sure if this is possible).
• Remove -c flag and automatically switch between powerwalk and filepath Walk functions

PRs for these would be appreciated.

Contributing

I've made an effort to keep the Fu source code simple, modular and easy to browse. Contributions are welcome. Just be sure to run go fmt and go vet on your code.