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:

SQL-like (not real SQL, but highly relaxed!) grammar easily understandable by humans
complex queries
aggregate, statistics, date, and other functions
search within archives
.gitignore, .hgignore, and .dockerignore support (experimental)
search by width and height of images, EXIF metadata
search by MP3 info
search by extended file attributes
search by file hashes
search by MIME type
shortcuts to common file types
interactive mode
various output formatting (CSV, JSON, and others)

More is under way!

Installation

Latest release from source

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

Windows 64bit

A statically precompiled binary is available at Github downloads.

Windows via winget

Install winget
Run winget install -e --id fselect.fselect

Windows via Chocolatey

Install Chocolatey
Run choco install fselect

Windows via Scoop

Install Scoop
Run scoop install fselect

Mac via Homebrew

Install brew
Run brew install fselect

Mac via MacPorts

Install MacPorts

Run:

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install fselect

Usage

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

Interactive mode

fselect -i

Documentation

More detailed description. Look at 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"

Search within a directory name with spaces (backticks are also supported):

fselect "name from '/home/user/dir with spaces' where size > 0"
fselect "name from `/home/user/dir with spaces` where size > 0"

Or simply escape the single quotes:

fselect name from \'/home/user/dir with spaces\' where size gt 0

Specify file size, get absolute path, and add it to the results:

cd /home/user
fselect size, abspath from ./tmp where size gt 2g
fselect fsize, abspath from ./tmp where size = 5m
fselect hsize, abspath from ./tmp where size lt 8k
fselect name, size from ./tmp where size between 5mb and 6mb

More complex query:

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

Aggregate functions (you can use curly braces if you want, and even combine them with the regular parentheses):

fselect "MIN(size), MAX{size}, AVG(size), SUM{size}, COUNT(*) from /home/user/Downloads"

Formatting functions:

fselect "LOWER(name), UPPER(name), LENGTH(name), YEAR(modified) from /home/user/Downloads"

Get the year of an oldest file:

fselect "MIN(YEAR(modified)) from /home/user"

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

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

Regular expressions of Rust flavor are supported:

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

Negate regular expressions:

fselect "name from . where path !=~ '^\./config'"

Simple globs expand automatically and work with = and != operators:

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 minimum and/or maximum depth specified (depth is a synonym for maxdepth):

fselect path from /home/user/oldstuff depth 5 where name = '*.jpg'
fselect path from /home/user/oldstuff mindepth 2 maxdepth 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 or .hgignore support:

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

Search by image dimensions:

fselect CONCAT(width, 'x', height), path from /home/user/photos where width gte 2000 or height gte 2000

Find square images:

fselect path from /home/user/Photos where width = height

Find images with a known name part but unknown extension:

fselect path from /home/user/projects where name = "*RDS*" and width gte 1

Find old-school rap MP3 files:

fselect duration, path from /home/user/music where genre = Rap and bitrate = 320 and mp3_year lt 2000  

Shortcuts to common file extensions:

fselect path from /home/user where is_archive = true
fselect path, mime from /home/user where is_audio = 1
fselect path, mime from /home/user where is_book != false

Even simpler way of using boolean columns:

fselect path from /home/user where is_doc
fselect path from /home/user where is_image
fselect path from /home/user where is_video

Find files with dangerous permissions:

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

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 name from /usr/bin where suid
fselect path from /tmp where is_pipe
fselect path from /tmp where is_socket

Find files with xattrs, check if particular xattr exists, or get its value:

fselect "path, has_xattrs, has_xattr(user.test), xattr(user.test) from /home/user"

Include arbitrary text as columns:

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

Group results:

fselect "ext, count(*) from /tmp group by ext"

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
fselect size, path from /home/user limit 5 into html

License

MIT/Apache-2.0

Supported by JetBrains IDEA open source license

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