FilesFinder

Find files matching patterns while respecting .gitignore

1. About
2. Installation
3. Examples
4. GitHub Action
5. Contributing

About

FilesFinder (FF) is a command-line tool that aims to search for files within a given repository. As such, it respects your .gitignore files and exclude the same files from the output.

FF is a faster and simpler-to-use alternative to other tools such as find from Findutils.

NOTE: FF is generally faster than find (or else), mainly because it uses parallel processing. If you find a scenario in which FF is slower than find or any other tool, please report it to me :-)

Installation

You can install the latest released version with cargo:

```bash

cargo install filesfinder ```

After that, FilesFinder can be used via the ff alias.

```text USAGE: ff [OPTIONS] ... ff [OPTIONS] [OPTIONS] ...

ARGS: ... A pattern to match against each file.

OPTIONS: -g, -G Parse pattern as a glob expression. [default behavior]

-r, -R
        Parse pattern as a regular expression.
        Note that expressions are unanchored by default.
        Use '^' or '\A' to denote start, and '$' or '\z' for the end. 

-i, -I
        Matching files will be included in the output.
        [default behavior]

-e, -E
        Matching files will be excluded from the output.

-j <JOBS>
        Number of threads to use.
        Setting this to zero will choose the number of threads automatically.
        [default: num_cpus]

    --dir <PATH>
        Files will be searched in the directory specified by the PATH.
        Multiple occurences are allowed.
        [default: '.']

    --max-depth <DEPTH>
        Maximum depth to recurse.
        [default: None]

    --follow-links
        Allow to follow symbolic links.

    --show-hidden
        Allow to show hidden files.

    --no-gitignore
        Ignore .gitignore files.

    --no-ignore
        Ignore .ignore files.

    --no-strip-prefix
        Do not strip './' prefix, same as what GNU find does.

-h, --help
        Print help information.

-V, --version
        Print version information.

NOTES: - Capitalized options (.e.g., '-G') apply to all subsequent patterns. E.g.: 'ff -g ".rs" -g ".md"' is equivalent to 'ff -G ".rs" ".md"'. You can always unset a flag by overriding it.

-   Options can be grouped under the same '-'.
    E.g.: 'ff -e -g "*.rs"' is equivalent to 'ff -eg "*.rs"'.

-   File exclusion is performed after file inclusion.

-   For performance reasons, prefer to use more general patterns first,
    and more specific ones at the end.
    E.g.: 'ff "*.md" "Cargo.toml"' is (usually) faster but equivalent to 'ff "Cargo.toml" "*.md"'.

```

Examples

```bash

ff "*.rs"

List all files with '.rs' extension

ff ".rs" -e "src/*.rs"

List all files with 'rs' extension except those in the 'src' folder

ff -r ".*.md"

List all files with 'md' extension, using regular expression

ff -Re "..md" "."

List all files except those with 'md' extension, using regular expression

```

GitHub Action

A major application to FF is to be used within repositories. Therefore, you can also use the FilesFinder GitHub Action withing your projects.

```yml

Your action in .github/workflows

• name: Checkout repository uses: actions/checkout@v3 # Repository name with owner. For example, actions/checkout # Default: ${{ github.repository }} repository: ''
• name: Find files matching ".rs" or ".md" uses: jeertmans/filesfinder@v0.4.1 id: ff # Any id, to be used later to reference to files output with: # Only argument, a single string, to be passed as arguments to ff. # See ff --help for more help. # Default: "" args: ".rs *.md"
• name: Print files run: echo "${{ steps.ff.outputs.files }}" ```

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome!