Fuzzy file search in linux console

Question

Does anybody know a way to perform a quick fuzzy search from linux console?

Quite often I come accross situation when I need to find a file in a project but I don\'t

Answer 1

You might want to try AGREP or something else that uses the TRE Regular Expression library.

(From their site:)

TRE is a lightweight, robust, and efficient POSIX compliant regexp matching library with some exciting features such as approximate (fuzzy) matching.
At the core of TRE is a new algorithm for regular expression matching with submatch addressing. The algorithm uses linear worst-case time in the length of the text being searched, and quadratic worst-case time in the length of the used regular expression. In other words, the time complexity of the algorithm is O(M2N), where M is the length of the regular expression and N is the length of the text. The used space is also quadratic on the length of the regex, but does not depend on the searched string. This quadratic behaviour occurs only on pathological cases which are probably very rare in practice.

TRE is not just yet another regexp matcher. TRE has some features which are not there in most free POSIX compatible implementations. Most of these features are not present in non-free implementations either, for that matter.

Approximate pattern matching allows matches to be approximate, that is, allows the matches to be close to the searched pattern under some measure of closeness. TRE uses the edit-distance measure (also known as the Levenshtein distance) where characters can be inserted, deleted, or substituted in the searched text in order to get an exact match. Each insertion, deletion, or substitution adds the distance, or cost, of the match. TRE can report the matches which have a cost lower than some given threshold value. TRE can also be used to search for matches with the lowest cost.

Answer 2

I don't know how familiar you are with the terminal, but this could help you:

find | grep 'report'
find | grep 'report.*2008'

Sorry if you already know grep and were looking for something more advanced.

Answer 3

I usually use:

ls -R | grep  -i [whatever I can remember of the file name]

From a directory above where I expect the file to be - the higher up you go in the directory tree, the slower this is going to go.

When I find the the exact file name, I use it in find:

find . [discovered file name]

This could be collapsed into one line:

for f in $(ls --color=never -R | grep --color=never -i partialName); do find -name $f; done

(I found a problem with ls and grep being aliased to "--color=auto")

Answer 4

You may find fzf useful. It's a general purpose fuzzy finder written in Go that can be used with any list of things: files, processes, command history, git branches, etc.

Its install script will setup CTRL-T keybinding for your shell. The following GIF shows how it works.

Answer 5

You can try c- (Cminus), a fuzzy dir changing tool of bash script, which using bash completion. It is somehow limited by only matching visited paths, but really convenient and quite fast.

GitHub project: whitebob/cminus

Introduction on YouTube: https://youtu.be/b8Bem53Cz9A

Answer 6

The fasd shell script is probably worth taking a look at too.

fasd offers quick access to files and directories for POSIX shells. It is inspired by tools like autojump, z and v. Fasd keeps track of files and directories you have accessed, so that you can quickly reference them in the command line.

It differs a little from a complete find of all files, as it only searches recently opened files. However it is still very useful.