Using ack (sometimes packaged as ack-grep) I know that I can find paths that contain a specific string by doing:
ack -g somestring
But what if I only want files which have "somestring" in their filenames?
Using ack (sometimes packaged as ack-grep) I know that I can find paths that contain a specific string by doing:
ack -g somestring
But what if I only want files which have "somestring" in their filenames?
You can use find
utility. Something like this:
find /path/to/look/in -name '*somestring*' -print
On some systems, if you omit the path, current directory is used. On other systems you can't omit it, just use .
for current directory instead.
Also, read man find
for many other options.
I agree find is the way to go, but you could also easily do it with ack:
ack -f | ack "string"
Here, "ack -f" recursively lists all the files it would search; pipe that to the second ack command to search through that. ack -f does have the advantage of skipping over binaries and directories even without any more arguments; often, then a "find" command could be replaced by a much shorter "ack" command.
If you wish to use ack
to find all files that have somestring
in their basename, just add [^/]*$
to the regex, e.g.,
ack -g somestring[^/]*$
Unfortunately, --color
will show the match from somestring
to the end of the filename; but it is possible to do what you asked for using ack
.
I can't comment yet, or else I'd add this to @dmedvinsky's answer above. You may want to combine his approach with @whaley's answer to a different question in order to filter out .svn
files:
find /path/to/look/in -not -iwholename '*.svn*' -name '*somestring*' -print
this works for me, ack -all "somestring" where as ack --all "somestring" will search all files that contain that string. ack "somestring" will only search files with that string. if you wanted to add some file type to search permanently like ruby files or you can create .ackrc file in your home directory, add the fallowing line --type-add=ruby=.haml,.rake,.rsel . JOsH