This sounds like an awesome tool, and the "hacker spirit" of it really speaks to me.
It's really fitting to have a supremely technical and focused tool like this be described with things like "pretty C expressions" and (my favorite) "it's like find(1), but more fun to use", because obviously writing low-level C-like expressions to match against files is fun, most of all. Love it.
Also some of the examples are truly powerful, and at least I was not aware of any tool that could do things like this:
# Find executable files that are larger than 10KiB, and have not been executed in the last 24 hours:
anyx && sz > 10K && atime < ago(day)
# Find regular files with multiple hard links
f && nlink > 1
# Find symlinks whose ultimate targets are on a different filesystem:
texists && tdev != dev
Examples all cherry-picked from the manual page, and I picked the most terse version, more readable/explanatory versions using fewer built-ins are also available.
Many of the examples feel liks "I would never need that"-territory, until you do and then it's like impossible unless you write your own specialized tool to do it, or reach for this. Very cool!
Comments
This sounds like an awesome tool, and the "hacker spirit" of it really speaks to me.
It's really fitting to have a supremely technical and focused tool like this be described with things like "pretty C expressions" and (my favorite) "it's like find(1), but more fun to use", because obviously writing low-level C-like expressions to match against files is fun, most of all. Love it.
Also some of the examples are truly powerful, and at least I was not aware of any tool that could do things like this:
Examples all cherry-picked from the manual page, and I picked the most terse version, more readable/explanatory versions using fewer built-ins are also available.Many of the examples feel liks "I would never need that"-territory, until you do and then it's like impossible unless you write your own specialized tool to do it, or reach for this. Very cool!