[Linux] Find filenames list by content search and file format

Generally computer users can memorize the locations of different files that they read or store. As the number of files increases, they can use descriptive filenames making it easy to guess the content by looking at the file name. However when the number of files grows higher & higher in number, it becomes a pain to remember locations or filenames. Also when a computer is used by some other person than the owner, it becomes even harder to locate some files.

Search by partial name

find -name "<filename pattern>"

Above command is useful only if you can remember the filenames at least some parts of the file name. If you are a software developer, you know how many times you would want to search files based on the content.

Search by content

find <path> -name "<file name pattern>" -exec grep -l "<text to search>" {} \;

Above command can be used to find the files based on content search. For example to find a file with a value say "db.user" in a properties file inside "/opt/work/project" folder (including sub folders) following command can be used.

find /opt/work/project -name "*.properties" -exec grep -l "db.user" {} \;

IgnoreCase search can be done by adding "-i" attribute to grep command; check following command.

find /opt/work/project -name "*.properties" -exec grep -il "db.user" {} \;

When would content search be used?

• You remember some parts of the content but not the file name
• Find which property file contains an specific property used in your program
• Locate the Style sheet (css file) containing a specific style class or property
• Find Java class files that references some methods like "indexOf"
• and so on...

Adding SQLite to Run BASIC

Here is some example code that runs under Run BASIC using SQLite v3.4. I haven't pushed this stuff onto the publicly hosted site. SQLite will come with the Run BASIC personal server and should be suitable for many projects. Support for other databases like Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, etc. will be added with the professional server license.

sqliteconnect #users, "test.db"
call execAndPrint "select * from users"
call execAndPrint "select count(*) from users"
#users disconnect()
end

sub execAndPrint query$
#users execute(query$)
while #users hasanswer()
result$ = #users nextrow$(",")
print result$
wend
end sub

SQLite is a popular database engine provided as a library and is supported for Windows, Mac and Linux. The source code is available and is in the public domain so it is completely free. We will support the parts of Run BASIC that integrate with SQLite, but as for the specific level of conformance to the SQL standard and other technical details, see http://www.sqlite.org/

The SQLITECONNECT #obj, "databasefile.db" statement connects to a database and sets the #obj variable to be a connection object. The connection object understands EXECUTE(), HASANSWER(), NEXTROW$() and DISCONNECT(). I'm sure there will be more commands.

Notice the NEXTROW$() method. It returns each query result row as a string, with each item delimited by the specified string ("," in the example but it could be CHR$(9) or something else). It is trivial then to use the WORD$() function to extract the information. We will certainly also add the ability to get items by name.