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:

cargo install filesfinder

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

Find files within current directory that match given patterns, while respecting gitignore rules.

Usage: ff [OPTIONS] <PATTERN>...
       ff [OPTIONS] <PATTERN> [OPTIONS] <PATTERN> ...

Arguments:
  <PATTERN>...
          A pattern to match against each file

Options:
  -h, --help
          Print help (see a summary with '-h')

  -V, --version
          Print version

Walk options:
  -j <JOBS>
          Number of threads to use.
          
          Setting this to zero will choose the number of threads automatically.

  -d, --dir <DIRECTORY>
          Directory to search for files
          
          [default: .]

      --max-depth <DEPTH>
          Maximum depth to recurse into directories

      --follow-links
          Allow to follow symbolic links

  -., --hidden
          Search hidden files and directories.
          
          By default, hidden files and directories are skipped.

      --no-gitignore
          Ignore .gitignore files

      --no-ignore
          Ignore .ignore files

Match options:
  -g
          Parse pattern as a glob expression (default) [global alias: G]

  -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
          Matching files will be included in the output (default) [global alias: I]

  -e
          Matching files will be excluded from the output [global alias: E]

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

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

> 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.

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

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome!