ffind: a sane replacement for command line file search

The main difference is that, where `ffind foo` appears to be comparable to

    find . -name "*foo*"

    find . -name ".*f.*o.*o.*"

There are some other features (e.g. '=' toggles literal match, it has smart handling for '/' and directory name grouping), but it's pretty straightforward to use. It also doesn't depend on python.

   findit() {
       find . -name \* -exec grep -iH $1 {} \;
   }

> find in this directory and all the subdirectories a file that contains some_text in its filename

This is NOT a find+grep/ack/ag -alike. It's used for rapid search on filenames, not file contents. Think of it as TextMate's Cmd-T for the command-line.

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Hin <identifier>

The -print0/xargs thing is to get around spaces in filenames or directories. I don't think spaces belong in source files (or directory trees containing source code) for a gazillion different reasons, but I still stumble across it every once in a great while. There are also platforms where system directories have spaces in them, so if you're scrounging through a deep subdirectory tree trying to find something, you may have to deal with the spaces thing. I've been bitten by it enough times that I just always do this rather than have to think about whether or not I might need to do it every time I use find.

Depending on what I'm looking for, I might select files with -type, or a -name glob, or whatever. I use '-type f' most commonly because the source code I deal with has a fair number of interesting things defined outside of files with the standard source/header extensions in their names.

There's usually a couple pipe stages after this filled with 'grep -v <stuff I don't care about>', or more greps to narrow down the result set. Sometimes this all goes in shell scripts or sometimes I just type it all out.

  function ffind {
      if [ $# -eq 1 ]; then
          search_path='.'
          expression=$1
      elif [ $# -eq 2 ]; then
          search_path=$1
          expression=$2
      else
          echo "ffind [path] expression"
          return 1
      fi
      find $search_path -name $expression
}

    mdfind -onlyin . <str>

    print -l **/*myfile