ff

Find Files (ff)

Find Files (ff) utility recursively searches the files whose names match the specified RegExp pattern in the provided directory (defaults to the current directory if not provided).

Dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE.

Screenshot

Installation

There are various ways to install ff on your system.

Install using Homebrew

If you use macOS, install ff simply using brew install vishaltelangre/tap/ff.

Download precompiled executables for your platform/OS

Download the latest precompiled executable ff binary for your platform from the releases page.

Install using Cargo

If you're a Rust programmer, download and install ff command using cargo install find-files. To update to a newer version, use the --force flag.

Benchmark Results

…

Command	Mean [ms]	Min…Max [ms]
find . -iregex '.*[0-9]\.jpg$'	42.8 ± 5.5	31.2…56.9
find . -iname '*[0-9].jpg'	60.8 ± 7.2	44.0…76.2
fd -HI '.*[0-9]\.jpg$'	18.8 ± 5.3	11.2…41.6
ff .*[0-9]\.jpg$	18.7 ± 4.6	11.7…30.4

Table: benchmark-results.md

NOTE: Sometimes, fd is a bit faster than ff by approximately 1 ms to 2 ms.

Usage

…

Examples

There are a tons of possibilities to search files using ff. Following examples demonstrate just a tip of an iceberg.

• List paths of files recursively in the current working directory matching article string.

  ff article
  

• List files having .png, or .PNG extension.

  ff png$
  

• List files having strict .PNG extension.

  ff -s PNG$
  

• Search various image files.

  ff "\.(png|jpg|jpeg|gif|svg)$"
  

• List files whose path matches controllers string.

  ff controllers
  

• Search .js files in ./spec directory.

  ff \.js ./spec
  

• Search a file which is expected to be inside hidden .git directory whose name contains commit or something similar.

  $ ff git.*commit
  
  ./.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG
  # omitted other results
  

• Do not show hidden files and directories in the search results.

  ff something -H
  

• Do not show those files and directories in the search results which are enlisted in .gitignore.

  ff src/.*js$ -G
  

  Without -G (--ignore-gitignore) flag in the above command, it also includes the results in the directories such as node_modules by default.

• Do not show paths which are just directories and not actual files.

  $ ff -D user
  
  ./app/models/user.rb
  ./app/models/user/address.rb
  ./specs/models/user_spec.rb
  ./specs/models/user/address_spec.rb
  

  Without -D (--exclude-dir-paths) flag in the above command, it also includes the paths of the matching directories in the results as follows.

  $ ff user
  
  ./app/models/user.rb
  ./app/models/user
  ./app/models/user/address.rb
  ./specs/models/user_spec.rb
  ./specs/models/user
  ./specs/models/user/address_spec.rb
  

• Exclude (omit) files and directories which match the provided optional exclude RegExp pattern.

  ff rb$ app/controllers -x /(audit|admin|sso|api)/
  

  Above command will show paths of all files whose name ends with rb inside the relative app/controllers directory excluding the paths which match /(audit|admin|sso|api)/ pattern.

• Limit searching beyond 3 levels deep in the given path.

  ff -L 3 .js$