Repository files navigation

zfind allows you to search for files, including insidetar,zip,7z andrar archives. It makes finding files easy with a filter syntax that is similar to an SQL-WHERE clause. This means, if you know SQL, you don't have to learn or remember any new syntax just for this tool.

• Basic Usage & Examples
• Where Syntax
• Properties
• Supported archives
• Actions
• Configuration
• Installation
  • Binary releases
  • Homebrew (macOS and Linux)
  • Arch Linux
  • Build from Source
• zfind as a Go module

zfind<where> [<path>...]

Examples

#find files smaller than 10KB,in the current pathzfind 'size<10k'#find filesin the given rangein /some/pathzfind 'size between 1M and 1G' /some/path#find files modified before 2010 inside a tarzfind 'date<"2010" and archive="tar"'#find files named foo* and modified todayzfind 'name like "foo%" and date=today'#find files that contain two dashes using a regexzfind 'name rlike "(.*-){2}"'#find files that have the extension .jpg or .jpegzfind 'ext in ("jpg","jpeg")'#find directories named foo and barzfind 'name in ("foo", "bar") and type="dir"'#searchforall README.md files and showin long listing formatzfind 'name="README.md"' -l#show resultsin csv formatzfind --csvzfind --csv-no-head

• AND,OR and() parentheses are logical operators used to combine multiple conditions.AND means that both conditions must be true for a row to be included in the results.OR means that if either condition is true, the row will be included. Parentheses are used to group conditions, just like in mathematics.

Example:'(size > 20M OR name = "temp") AND type="file"' selects all files that are either greater than 20 MB in size or are named temp.

• Operators=,<>,!=,<,>,<=,>= are comparison operators used to compare values and file properties. The types must match, meaning don't compare a date to a file size.

Example:'date > "2020-10-01"' selects all files that were modified after the specified date.

• LIKE,ILIKE andRLIKE are used for pattern matching in strings.
  • LIKE is case-sensitive, whileILIKE is case-insensitive.
  • The% symbol is used as a wildcard character that matches any sequence of characters.
  • The_ symbol matches any single character.
  • RLIKE allows matching a regular expression.

Example:'"name like "z%"' selects all files whose name starts with 'z'.

• IN allows you to specify multiple values to match. A file will be included if the value of the property matches any of the values in the list.

Example:'"type in ("file", "link")' selects all files of type file or link.

• BETWEEN selects values within a given range (inclusive).

Example:'"date between "2010" and "2011-01-15"' means that all files that were modified from 2010 to 2011-01-15 will be included.

• NOT is a logical operator used to negate a condition. It returns true if the condition is false and vice versa.

Example:'"name not like "z%"','"date not between "2010" and "2011-01-15"','"type not in ("file", "link")'

• Values can be numbers, text, date and time,TRUE andFALSE
  • dates have to be specified inYYYY-MM-DD format
  • times have to be specified in 24hHH:MM:SS format
  • numbers can be written as sizes by appendingB,K,M,G andT to specify bytes, KB, MB, GB, and TB.
  • empty strings and0 evaluate tofalse

The following file properties are available:

Helper properties

Note: use the flag -n (or --no-archive) to disable archive support. You can also use'not archive' in your query but this still requires zfind to open the archive.

zfind does not implement actions likefind, instead usexargs -0 to execute commands:

zfind --no-archive'name like "%.txt"' -0| xargs -0 -L1echo

zfind can also produce--csv (or--csv-no-head) that can be piped to other commands.

Set the environment variableNO_COLOR to disable color output.

You can download the official zfind binaries from the releases page and place it in yourPATH.

• https://github.com/laktak/zfind/releases

Prereleased versions can be found directly on theGitHub Action. Click on the latestci action and look forprerelease-artifacts at the bottom.

For macOS and Linux it can also be installed viaHomebrew:

brew install zfind

zfind is available in the AUR aszfind:

paru -S zfind

Building from the source requires Go.

• Either install it directly

go install github.com/laktak/zfind/cmd/zfind@latest

• or clone and build

git clone https://github.com/laktak/zfindzfind/scripts/build# output is here:zfind/zfind

zfind is can also be used in other Go programs.

go get github.com/laktak/zfind

The library consists of two main packages:

• filter: provides functionality for parsing and evaluating SQL-where filter expressions
• find: implements searching for files and directories.

For more information see the linked documentation on pkg.go.dev.