Fuzzy file search in linux console

Question

Does anybody know a way to perform a quick fuzzy search from linux console?

Quite often I come accross situation when I need to find a file in a project but I don't remember the exact filename. In Sublime text editor I would press Ctrl-P and type a part of the name, which will produce a list of the files to select from. That's an amazing feature I'm quite happy with. The problem is that in most cases I have to browse a code in a console on remote machines via ssh. So I'm wondering is there a tool similar to "Go Anywhere" feature for Linux console?

Answer 1

find . -iname '*foo*'

Case insensitive find of filenames containing foo.

Answer 2

You could use find like this for complex regex:

find . -type f -regextype posix-extended -iregex ".*YOUR_PARTIAL_NAME.*" -print

Or this for simplier glob-like matches:

find . -type f -name "*YOUR_PARTIAL_NAME*" -print

Or you could also use find2perl (which is quite faster and more optimized than find), like this:

find2perl . -type f -name "*YOUR_PARTIAL_NAME*" -print | perl

If you just want to see how Perl does it, remove the | perl part and you'll see the code it generates. It's a very good way to learn by the way.

Alternatively, write a quick bash wrapper like this, and call it whenever you want:

#! /bin/bash
FIND_BASE="$1"
GLOB_PATTERN="$2"
if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
    echo "Syntax: $(basename $0) <FIND_BASE> <GLOB_PATTERN>"
else
        find2perl "$FIND_BASE" -type f -name "*$GLOB_PATTERN*" -print | perl
fi

Name this something like qsearch and then call it like this: qsearch . something

Answer 3

You can try c- (Cminus), a fuzzy dir changing tool of bash script, which using bash completion. It is somehow limited by only matching visited paths, but really convenient and quite fast.

GitHub project: whitebob/cminus

Introduction on YouTube: https://youtu.be/b8Bem53Cz9A

Answer 4

I usually use:

ls -R | grep  -i [whatever I can remember of the file name]

From a directory above where I expect the file to be - the higher up you go in the directory tree, the slower this is going to go.

When I find the the exact file name, I use it in find:

find . [discovered file name]

This could be collapsed into one line:

for f in $(ls --color=never -R | grep --color=never -i partialName); do find -name $f; done

(I found a problem with ls and grep being aliased to "--color=auto")

Answer 5

You may find fzf useful. It's a general purpose fuzzy finder written in Go that can be used with any list of things: files, processes, command history, git branches, etc.

Its install script will setup CTRL-T keybinding for your shell. The following GIF shows how it works.