fselect

Find files with SQL-like queries

Why use fselect?

While it doesn't tend to fully replace traditional find and ls, fselect has these nice features:

• complex queries
• SQL-like (not real SQL, but highly relaxed!) grammar easily understandable by humans
• search within archives
• search by width and height of images
• shortcuts to common file types

More is under way!

Installation

• Install Rust with Cargo and its dependencies to build a binary
• Run cargo install fselect

...or download a statically precompiled binary from Github if you are on a modern Windows 64bit

Usage

fselect COLUMN[, COLUMN...] [from ROOT[, ROOT...]] [where EXPR] [limit N] [into FORMAT]

Examples

Find temporary or config files (full path and size):

fselect size, path from /home/user where name = '*.cfg' or name = '*.tmp'

Windows users may omit the quotes:

fselect size, path from C:\Users\user where name = *.cfg or name = *.tmp

Or put all the arguments into the quotes like this:

fselect "name from /home/user/tmp where size > 0"

Find files (just names) with any content (size > 0):

fselect name from /home/user/tmp where size gt 0

Specify file size and add it to the results:

fselect size, path from /home/user/tmp where size gt 2g
fselect fsize, path from /home/user/tmp where size = 5m
fselect hsize, path from /home/user/tmp where size lt 8k

More complex query:

fselect name from /tmp where (name = '*.tmp' and size = 0) or (name = '*.cfg' and size gt 1000000)

Use single quotes if you need to address files with spaces:

fselect path from '/home/user/Misc stuff' where name != 'Some file'

Regular expressions supported:

fselect name from /home/user where path ~= '.*Rust.*'

And even simple glob will suffice:

fselect name from /home/user where path = '*Rust*'

Exact match operators to search with regexps disabled:

fselect path from /home/user where name === 'some_*_weird_*_name'

Find files by creation date:

fselect path from /home/user where created = 2017-05-01

Be more specific to match all files created at 3PM:

fselect path from /home/user where created = '2017-05-01 15'

And even more specific:

fselect path from /home/user where created = '2017-05-01 15:10'
fselect path from /home/user where created = '2017-05-01 15:10:30'

Date and time intervals possible (find everything updated since May 1st):

fselect path from /home/user where modified gte 2017-05-01

Default is current directory:

fselect path, size where name = '*.jpg'

Search within multiple locations:

fselect path from /home/user/oldstuff, /home/user/newstuff where name = '*.jpg'

With maximum depth specified:

fselect path from /home/user/oldstuff depth 5 where name = '*.jpg'
fselect path from /home/user/oldstuff depth 5, /home/user/newstuff depth 10 where name = '*.jpg'

Optionally follow symlinks:

fselect path, size from /home/user symlinks where name = '*.jpg'

Search within archives (currently only zip-archives are supported):

fselect path, size from /home/user archives where name = '*.jpg'

Or in combination:

fselect size, path from /home/user depth 5 archives symlinks where name = '*.jpg' limit 100

Search by image dimensions:

fselect width, height, path from /home/user/photos where width gte 2000 or height gte 2000

Shortcuts to common file extensions:

fselect path from /home/user where is_archive = true
fselect path from /home/user where is_audio = 1
fselect path from /home/user where is_doc != 1
fselect path from /home/user where is_image = false
fselect path from /home/user where is_video != true

Find files with dangerous permissions:

fselect mode, path from /home/user where other_write = true or other_exec = true

Simple glob-like expressions or even regular expressions on file mode are possible:

fselect mode, path from /home/user where mode = '*rwx'
fselect mode, path from /home/user where mode =~ '.*rwx$'

Find files by owner's uid or gid:

fselect uid, gid, path from /home/user where uid != 1000 or gid != 1000

Or by owner's or group's name:

fselect user, group, path from /home/user where user = mike or group = mike

Finally limit the results:

fselect name from /home/user/samples limit 5

Format output:

fselect size, path from /home/user limit 5 into json
fselect size, path from /home/user limit 5 into csv

Columns and expression fields

• path
• name
• size
• hsize or fsize
• uid
• gid
• user
• group
• created
• accessed
• modified
• is_dir
• is_file
• is_symlink
• mode
• user_read
• user_write
• user_exec
• group_read
• group_write
• group_exec
• other_read
• other_write
• other_exec
• is_hidden
• width
• height
• is_archive
• is_audio
• is_doc
• is_image
• is_source
• is_video

Operators

• = or == or eq
• != or <> or ne
• ===
• !==
• > or gt
• >= or gte or ge
• < or lt
• <= or lte or le
• =~ or ~= or regexp or rx

File size specifiers

• g or gb for gibibytes
• m or mb for mibibytes
• k or kb for kibibytes

File extensions

• is_archive: .7z, .bzip2, .gz, .gzip, .rar, .tar, .xz, .zip
• is_audio: .aac, .aiff, .amr, .flac, .gsm, .m4a, .m4b, .m4p, .mp3, .ogg, .wav, .wma
• is_doc: .accdb, .doc, .docx, .dot, .dotx, .mdb, .ods, .odt, .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .rtf, .xls, .xlt, .xlsx, .xps
• is_image: .bmp, .gif, .jpeg, .jpg, .png, .tiff, .webp
• is_source: .asm, .c, .cpp, .cs, .java, .js, .h, .hpp, .pas, .php, .pl, .pm, .py, .rb, .rs, .swift
• is_video: .3gp, .avi, .flv, .m4p, .m4v, .mkv, .mov, .mp4, .mpeg, .mpg, .webm, .wmv

Output formats

• tabs - default, columns are separated with tabulation
• lines - each column goes at a separate line
• list - columns are separated with NULL symbol, similar to -print0 argument of find
• csv - comma-separated columns
• json - array of resulting objects with requested columns

License

MIT/Apache-2.0