fselect

Find files with SQL-like queries

Why use fselect?

While it doesn't tend to fully replace traditional find and ls, fselect has these nice features:

• complex queries
• SQL-like (not real SQL, but highly relaxed!) grammar easily understandable by humans
• search within archives
• .gitignore support (experimental)
• search by width and height of images
• search by MP3 info
• shortcuts to common file types
• various output formatting (CSV, JSON, and others)

More is under way!

Installation

From source

• Install Rust with Cargo and its dependencies to build a binary
• Run cargo install fselect

Arch Linux

AUR package, thanks to @asm0dey

Other Linux

Static build with musl.

Windows 64bit

A statically precompiled binary is available at Github downloads.

Mac

Precompiled on OS X Mavericks 10.9.5

Mac from brew

• Install brew
• Run brew install fselect

Usage

fselect COLUMN[, COLUMN...] [from ROOT[, ROOT...]] [where EXPR] [order by COLUMNS] [limit N] [into FORMAT]

Documentation

More detailed description. Look examples first.

Examples

Find temporary or config files (full path and size):

fselect size, path from /home/user where name = '*.cfg' or name = '*.tmp'

Windows users may omit the quotes:

fselect size, path from C:\Users\user where name = *.cfg or name = *.tmp

Or put all the arguments into the quotes like this:

fselect "name from /home/user/tmp where size > 0"

Find files (just names) with any content (size > 0):

fselect name from /home/user/tmp where size gt 0

Specify file size and add it to the results:

fselect size, path from /home/user/tmp where size gt 2g
fselect fsize, path from /home/user/tmp where size = 5m
fselect hsize, path from /home/user/tmp where size lt 8k

More complex query:

fselect "name from /tmp where (name = *.tmp and size = 0) or (name = *.cfg and size > 1000000)"

Use single quotes if you need to address files with spaces:

fselect path from '/home/user/Misc stuff' where name != 'Some file'

Regular expressions supported:

fselect name from /home/user where path =~ '.*Rust.*'

And even simple glob will suffice:

fselect name from /home/user where path = '*Rust*'

Classic LIKE:

fselect path from /home/user where name like %report-2018-__-__???

Exact match operators to search with regexps disabled:

fselect path from /home/user where name === 'some_*_weird_*_name'

Find files by date:

fselect path from /home/user where created = 2017-05-01
fselect path from /home/user where modified = today
fselect path from /home/user where accessed = yesterday
fselect path from /home/user where modified = 'apr 1'
fselect path from /home/user where modified = 'last fri'

Be more specific to match all files created at interval between 3PM and 4PM:

fselect path from /home/user where created = '2017-05-01 15'

And even more specific:

fselect path from /home/user where created = '2017-05-01 15:10'
fselect path from /home/user where created = '2017-05-01 15:10:30'

Date and time intervals possible (find everything updated since May 1st):

fselect path from /home/user where modified gte 2017-05-01

Default is current directory:

fselect path, size where name = '*.jpg'

Search within multiple locations:

fselect path from /home/user/oldstuff, /home/user/newstuff where name = '*.jpg'

With maximum depth specified:

fselect path from /home/user/oldstuff depth 5 where name = '*.jpg'
fselect path from /home/user/oldstuff depth 5, /home/user/newstuff depth 10 where name = '*.jpg'

Optionally follow symlinks:

fselect path, size from /home/user symlinks where name = '*.jpg'

Search within archives (currently only zip-archives are supported):

fselect path, size from /home/user archives where name = '*.jpg'

Or in combination:

fselect size, path from /home/user depth 5 archives symlinks where name = '*.jpg' limit 100

Enable .gitignore support:

fselect size, path from /home/user/projects gitignore where name = '*.cpp'        

Search by image dimensions:

fselect width, height, path from /home/user/photos where width gte 2000 or height gte 2000

Find old-school rap MP3 files:

fselect path from /home/user/music where genre = Rap and bitrate = 320 and year lt 2000  

Shortcuts to common file extensions:

fselect path from /home/user where is_archive = true
fselect path from /home/user where is_audio = 1
fselect path from /home/user where is_book != false
fselect path from /home/user where is_doc != 1
fselect path from /home/user where is_image = false
fselect path from /home/user where is_video != true

Find files with dangerous permissions:

fselect mode, path from /home/user where other_write = true or other_exec = true

Simple glob-like expressions or even regular expressions on file mode are possible:

fselect mode, path from /home/user where mode = '*rwx'
fselect mode, path from /home/user where mode =~ '.*rwx$'

Find files by owner's uid or gid:

fselect uid, gid, path from /home/user where uid != 1000 or gid != 1000

Or by owner's or group's name:

fselect user, group, path from /home/user where user = mike or group = mike

Find special files:

fselect path from /tmp where is_pipe = true
fselect path from /tmp where is_socket = 1

Include arbitrary text as columns:

fselect name, ' has size of ', size, ' bytes'

Order results:

fselect path from /tmp order by size desc, name
fselect modified, fsize, path from ~ order by 1 desc, 3

Finally limit the results:

fselect name from /home/user/samples limit 5 

Format output:

fselect size, path from /home/user limit 5 into json
fselect size, path from /home/user limit 5 into csv

License

MIT/Apache-2.0