Find files with SQL-like queries
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, compare results in several directories with subqueries
- aggregate, statistics, date, and other functions
- search within archives
.gitignore,.hgignore, and.dockerignoresupport (experimental)- search by width and height of images, EXIF metadata
- search by MP3 info
- search by extended file attributes, POSIX ACLs, and Linux capabilities
- 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!
- Install Rust with Cargo and its dependencies to build a binary
- Run
cargo install fselect
AUR package, thanks to @asm0dey
AUR bin package, thanks to @4censord
fselect in nixpkgs, thanks to @filalex77
A statically precompiled binary is available at GitHub downloads.
- Install winget
- Run
winget install -e --id fselect.fselect
- Install Chocolatey
- Run
choco install fselect
- Install Scoop
- Run
scoop install fselect
- Install brew
- Run
brew install fselect
- Install MacPorts
- Run:
sudo port selfupdate sudo port install fselect
fselect [ARGS] COLUMN[, COLUMN...] [from ROOT[, ROOT...]] [where EXPR] [group by COLUMNS] [order by COLUMNS] [limit N] [offset N] [into FORMAT] fselect -i Detailed description of all the supported features.
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 quote:
fselect name from \'/home/user/dir with spaces\' where size gt 0 Specify the file size, get an 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)" You can use subqueries:
fselect "name from /test1 where size > 100 and size in (select size from /test2 where name in (select name from /test3 where modified in (select modified from /test4 where size < 200)))" fselect "name, path, size from /data as data where exists (select * from /backup as backup where backup.name = data.name)" 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 the 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 an 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 are possible (find everything updated since May 1st):
fselect path from /home/user where modified gte 2017-05-01 Default is the 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 git 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 in 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_sticky fselect path from /tmp where is_pipe fselect path from /tmp where is_socket Find files with xattrs, check if a 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 MIT/Apache-2.0
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