Description

This is a drop-in replacement for the find module currently in the standard
library. It is modeled on a typical 'find' command found on most Unix systems.

Synopsis

require 'file/find'

rule = File::Find.new(
  :pattern => "*.rb",
  :follow  => false,
  :path    => ['/usr/local/lib', '/opt/local/lib']
)

rule.find{ |f|
  puts f
}

Installation

gem install file-find

Rationale

The current find module in the standard library is inadequate. It is, quite
frankly, not much more than a plain Dir.glob call. This library provides an
interface based on options typically available on your command line 'find'
command, thus allowing you much greater control over how you find your files.

Options

* atime
* ctime
* follow
* ftype
* inum (except Windows)
* group (name or id)
* maxdepth
* mindepth
* mount
* mtime
* name (or 'pattern')
* path
* perm (except Windows)
* prune
* size
* user (name or id)

In addition to the above options, FileTest methods such as 'readable?' and
'writable?' may be used as keys, with true or false for their values.

See the RDoc documentation for more details about these options.

Future Plans

More options will be added as time permits, and requests will definitely be
considered. Please log any feature requests on the project page at
http://www.rubyforge.org/projects/shards.

Some specific things I plan on adding:

* exec
* links
* support for :user and :group on MS Windows

Options I won’t support

Generally speaking, anything that would require mucking around with C code
or is just too difficult to implement in a cross platform manner will not be
supported. These include the following options:

* acl/xattr - Way too difficult to implement in a cross platform manner, and
  a rarely used option in practice.

* cpio/ncpio - I will not shell out to this or any other 3rd party
  application.

* ls/print - Use Ruby's builtin printing methods to print as you see fit.

* ok - This is not interactive software.

Known Issues

The mindepth and maxdepth options do not work for more than 1 path.

The 'perm' option does not work on MS Windows, even for its limited subset of
permissions, i.e. 664 and 666. This is arguably a bug in Ruby's
File::Stat.mode method on MS Windows.

The 'user' and 'group' options are not currently supported on MS Windows.
This can be supported, but will require changes in the win32-file and
win32-file-stat libraries (which would then become dependencies).

There are 3 test failures with JRuby, all related to the 'perm' option. I
have not been able to reduce them to a simple test case and discern the
exact cause of the failures, though I suspect a bug in the JRuby
implementation of File.chmod.

Bugs

None that I'm aware of beyond the ones mentioned in the Known Issues. Please
log any bug reports on the project page at:

http://github.com/djberg96/file-find

Acknowledgements

* Richard Clamp's File::Find::Rule Perl module for additional ideas and
  inspiration.
* Bill Kleb for ideas regarding name, group and perm enhancements.
* Hal Fulton for his implementation of symbolic permissions.

License

Artistic 2.0

Copyright

(C) 2007-2013, Daniel J. Berger, All Rights Reserved

Author

Daniel J. Berger