Smart find

Do you have so much stuff that you never run find in / or home dir, because it takes so long? Or maybe you get a lot of crap in the results, making it harder to grep for what you want?

smart-find can be used just like find (it accepts paths and options), but it will automatically ignore directories like

• ~/.local/share/Trash
• node_modules
• .git/objects

This results in over an order of magnitude speedup and size reduction of the results:

$ time find ~ | wc -l
1597306
real 0m28.815s

$ time smart-find ~ | wc -l
61622
real 0m1.677s

Installation and usage

Simply clone the repo and ensure the script is in your PATH (Note: Mac users should update ~/.bash_profile instead of ~/.bashrc):

git clone https://github.com/jan-warchol/smart-find.git
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/smart-find' >> ~/.bashrc

That's it! New shell sessions should have smart-find command available.

You may want to add an alias to override ordinary find:

echo 'alias find=smart-find' >> ~/.bashrc

Note that aliases usually work only in interactive sessions, not in scripts.

Adjusting ignored directories

smart-find comes with a list of patters to use for pruning the results, but you can easily customize it. I wrote a helper script for finding directories with lots of files - use like this:

cd <directory to analyze>
analyze-file-count

then edit smart-find, adding options as you like.