Can ack find files based on filename only?

Question

Using ack (sometimes packaged as ack-grep) I know that I can find paths that contain a specific string by doing:
ack -g somestring

But what if I only want files which have "somestring" in their filenames?

score 50 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 06 '13 at 20:31

50

I agree find is the way to go, but you could also easily do it with ack:

ack -f | ack "string"

Here, "ack -f" recursively lists all the files it would search; pipe that to the second ack command to search through that. ack -f does have the advantage of skipping over binaries and directories even without any more arguments; often, then a "find" command could be replaced by a much shorter "ack" command.

answered Mar 06 '13 at 20:31

user2141650

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Find is faster. – niken Sep 29 '16 at 14:34
ack -f | rg "string" – arpit Dec 22 '16 at 12:56
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This answer would include matches in the path (directory names, which the question wanted to exclude) as well as in the filename. – Joshua Goldberg Mar 12 '18 at 01:35

dmedvinsky · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-25T09:09:23.000

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You can use find utility. Something like this:

find /path/to/look/in -name '*somestring*' -print

On some systems, if you omit the path, current directory is used. On other systems you can't omit it, just use . for current directory instead.

Also, read man find for many other options.

edited Feb 25 '13 at 09:09

answered Oct 08 '11 at 18:33

dmedvinsky

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This is the answer. Unless you're using the filetype detection features of ack, `find` is the way to go. – Andy Lester Oct 15 '11 at 04:53
This is not an answer to the question. Question is about how to do it with ack. There is at least one use case, where this is useless - consider someone using ack on windows - there your answer won't work. – Konrad Nov 21 '19 at 10:36

score 7 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 27 '16 at 02:57

If you wish to use ack to find all files that have somestring in their basename, just add [^/]*$ to the regex, e.g.,

ack -g somestring[^/]*$

Unfortunately, --color will show the match from somestring to the end of the filename; but it is possible to do what you asked for using ack.

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

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I can't comment yet, or else I'd add this to @dmedvinsky's answer above. You may want to combine his approach with @whaley's answer to a different question in order to filter out .svn files:

find /path/to/look/in -not -iwholename '*.svn*' -name '*somestring*' -print

edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

Community

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answered Mar 22 '14 at 18:53

tony_tiger

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score -2 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 12 '12 at 19:29

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this works for me, ack -all "somestring" where as ack --all "somestring" will search all files that contain that string. ack "somestring" will only search files with that string. if you wanted to add some file type to search permanently like ruby files or you can create .ackrc file in your home directory, add the fallowing line --type-add=ruby=.haml,.rake,.rsel . JOsH

answered Apr 12 '12 at 19:29

JOsH Lindsay

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This appears to search file contents. That's not what the question asked for. – isherwood Jan 23 '18 at 20:58

Can ack find files based on filename only?

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