I regularly have to find where a file is located and usually use find:

find . | grep 

Where is replaced with the filename or partial name to match. So I finally decided to write a script to just run this and allow me to print the matching names and even potentially pass the -i flag to grep.

#!/bin/sh

if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
  echo 1>&2 Usage: $0 ""
  exit 127
fi
icase=

while [ $# -ge 1 ]; do
   case $1 in
     -i)  icase=$1;;
      *)  search=$1 ;;
   esac
   shift
done

find .  | grep $icase $search

This is just a simple script which I have named ffind that searches starting from the current directory. This lets me search with the following commands:

ffind bak$

This will search for all files that end with “bak” .

ffind -i edr

This will search for all files with “edr” regardless of case

I have been searching through source code and files for years. And I used to use find with a few arguments to get what I was looking for.

find . -exec grep  {} \; -print

I used the -print after the exec arguments to show the file only when the grep succeeded.  This worked but was a bit to type each time I used it. So I came up with a little script that would help me to search for the an argument and even allow a case insensitive search as well.
 

#!/bin/sh

if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
  echo 1>&2 Usage: $0 ""
  exit 127
fi
icase=
search=

while [ $# -ge 1 ]; do
  case $1 in
     -i) icase=$1;;
      *) search=$1 ;;
  esac
  shift
done

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep $icase $search

The script takes at least one argument and excepts a ‘-i’ argument to make grep use a case insensitive search. This will print the file name and the line that matches the search term. It can be easily adapted to show the count of matched patterns (‘-c’) or the line number (‘-n’).