from Hacker News

Rawhide – (rh) find files using pretty C expressions

by gbrown_ on 9/25/22, 9:54 AM with 14 comments

by unwind on 9/26/22, 6:56 AM
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!
by an1sotropy on 9/26/22, 6:37 AM
Looking at the last line:
```
   Authors: 1990 Ken Stauffer, 2022 raf <raf@raf.org>
```
Has this been around since 1990?
I’m bummed I didn’t know about it. The variety of output options is amazing.
by rurban on 9/26/22, 7:58 AM
What did he do to rh? I suppose just adding json support, and 64bit off_t support.
Ah, I see: https://github.com/raforg/rawhide/commits/main A bit more cleanup and handy aliases also.
by tyingq on 9/26/22, 11:58 AM
This looks very handy, and maps closely to something I use Perl for, but that requires more boilerplate.
But, if you find yourself wanting something like this, and don't want to install anything new... Here's something close in Perl that uses File::stat (this ships with Perl):
```
  find . -print | perl -MFile::stat -nE 'chomp;$s=stat($_);$s->nlink > 1 && say'
```