softwhere: an alternative to grep for searching your source trees

At a previous workplace, we had a little script built around glimpse that indexed our source tree, making it quick to search for keywords. Someone cleverly called this script softwhere, and gave it a handy alias of sw.

When I started working on Mozilla, I wanted softwhere. And I thought to myself: “Hey, I run OS X now. Isn’t every file on my computer automatically indexed?” The answer, of course, is yes. And thus, softwhere 2.0 was born:

#!/bin/sh

files=`mdfind -onlyin /src/mozilla-central "$*"`

for file in $files; do
    grep -H "$*" $file
done

(You’ll need to replace /src/mozilla-central in the mdfind command above to wherever you store your primary source code repository.)

I’ve saved softwhere.sh in ~/bin, which is in my PATH. And I’ve added alias sw=softwhere.sh into my .bashrc. And thus:

joe@joe-laptop:~$ sw imgLoader::Init
/src/mozilla-central/modules/libpr0n/src/imgLoader.cpp.orig:nsresult imgLoader::InitCache()
/src/mozilla-central/modules/libpr0n/src/imgLoader.cpp.orig:nsresult imgLoader::Init()
joe@joe-laptop:~$

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 26th, 2011 at 5:04 pm and is filed under development. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

5 comments

  1. David Humphrey
    July 26, 2011 at 5:12 pm

    Neat, I’ve played with similar things, but not using the mac index; very cool!

    http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=138

    Reply
  2. Justin L.
    July 26, 2011 at 5:51 pm

    And here’s a wrapper I’ve written integrating grep into Vim. (grep’ing the whole source tree takes less than a second on my Linux box.)

    http://jlebar.com/2011/3/23/Vim_search_plugin.html

    Reply
  3. Kris Shannon
    July 26, 2011 at 5:56 pm

    Perfect example for xargs….

    #!/bin/sh

    mdfind -onlyin /src/mozilla-central “$*” | \
    xargs grep -H “$*”

    Reply
  5. Jan!
    July 28, 2011 at 5:27 am

    +1 for Ack! I find it even better than using Spotlight, even though it does not use an index.

    Reply

Leave a comment