How to use findit

Printing the help screen

Using:

findit --help

will print the help screen with all the available options to the standard output.

Choosing the root to start from

By default, using:

findit

will just print all the files and directory under the current directory. You can use another root by passing it as an argument to the command. For example:

findit ./src

will only list the files under ./src while

findit /bin

will list all the files under /bin

Filtering files

By default, findit will display all the files under the root directory. To filter files, you can use the --where (or -w) parameter. For example:

findit --where 'path.contains("build") AND extension == "class"'

will find all the class files under any build directory in the current directory.

To see more details on the available syntax, see syntax language docs. Please note, you can only filter based on Boolean values.

Ordering the files

Explicit order

By default, findit will display the files by the order in which it found them. You can change this by using the --order-by (or -o) parameter. For example:

findit  --order-by 'size DESC'  -l 10 -w 'IS FILE'

will display the 10 largest files, while:

findit  --order-by 'size'  -l 10 -w 'IS FILE'

will display the 10 smallest files.

To see more details on the available syntax, see syntax language docs Note that adding the DESC will change the order to descending order, while omitting it or adding ASC will make the order ascending.

You can also sort by a list of expressions. For example:

findit --order-by 'extension, size DESC'  -l 10

will sort the files by extension and then by the size.

implicit order

You can also use the --node-first to indicate that findit should start from the nodes (i.e. the files and not the directories).

Limit the depth

By default, findit will consider all the files in the root directory. You can change it by using the --max-depth (or -x) and/or the --min-depth (or -n) parameters. For example:

findit -n 2 -x 3

will only consider files with depth 2 or 3. The root depth is 0, files directly under the root have depth 1 and so on.

Note that you can also use the depth property of the file for more complicated filtering.

Limit the number of results

By default, findit will consider all the files in the root directory. You can limit the number of results to a specific number of files by using the --limit (or -l) parameter. See example in the ordering section above.

Controlling the output

By default, findit will print the path of each file that passed the filters and limitations. You can change this using the --display (or -d) parameter. The display argument syntax is text with backticks (\`) sounding any syntax you want to display.

For example:

findit -d 'file name: `name`, size: `size`bytes, was created at `created`'

If the display contains any backticks (\), you can replace them with any other non-empty string using the–interpolation-start and –interpolation-end` arguments. For example:

findit -d 'file name: <-name->, size: <-size->bytes, was created at <-created->' --interpolation-start='<-' --interpolation-end='->'

To see more details on the available syntax, see syntax language docs

Debugging the process

You can enable debug output using the --debug-output-file flag to see:

Which files findit considered
Which directories it visited
When it applied limits
The output of the Debug method (see the Debug method)

Example:

findit --debug-output-file=/tmp/debug.log --where 'size > 1024'

Then view the log:

less /tmp/debug.log