In Emacs how can I search a directory and all subdirectories for a filename?
6 Answers
You can use M-x find-name-dired
. It will ask for a directory and a wildcard pattern, so you can enter something like *thing*
and have all files with "thing" in the name listed in a dired buffer.
More here: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/RecursiveGrep (along with a snippet that lets you skip writing out the stars too).
In dired, you can list all the subdirectories of the visited directory by moving to the first line and pressing C-u l
and adding the R
switch. You can then search the file name in the buffer, or mark files based on a regexp with % m
.
On Linux, or Windows with Cygwin utilities, or other unix-like system with GNU find, a quick-and-dirty hack is M-x grep-find
, and edit the command line to contain just the find
part with a suitable format:
find -type f -name '*.foo' -printf '%p:0:\n'
On any system that has unix tools available, you can run the find
command with M-! find
. In the output buffer, you can use M-x ffap
to visit the chosen file. You can also set up dired-x so that C-u C-x C-f
can be used instead of M-x ffap
.
You can open: */foo.bar
for finding any files named foo.bar in a direct subdirectory of the current one, or **/foo.bar
for finding any files named foo.bar recursively in subdirectories of the current one.
If you're using consult, there is the very convenient consult-find
:
It updates the minibuffer as you type, and then you can just select the item you want and press ENTER to open the file in a buffer.
I'm also using vertico for the vertical minibuffer display and marginalia for the in-minibuffer function annotations seen in the first screenshot.