Day: February 11, 2005

So remember my new toy – the command line? Well, I didn’t just drop it after a few days.

I don’t know about anyone else, but the Search Tool in Windows XP really bugs me. I’m not just talking about that stupid dog wagging its tail all the time (OK, I’m a cat person, so maybe I’m biased) – I’m talking about how the results always seem a bit odd, and never really tell me what I want.

Sometimes I want to know all files in a folder tree with ‘Widget’ as part of their name. Sometimes I want to know all files in a folder tree with ‘Widget’ as part of their content.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present you with find and grep. Simply put your Cygwin prompt into the directory you want to start at, and:

• find . -name '*Widget*' – searches file names
• grep -r Widget * – searches file content

Simple, clean, fast, effective. And no dumb tail wagging noises coming out of my speaker.

If you’ve been following my ‘How to setup a .NET Development Tree’ series, you might have been encouraged to start work on a new development tree. If you are, then you might want to check out Tree Surgeon. Its a new Open Source project I’ve started which will create a complete development tree for you, parameterized for your needs. At the moment those parameters are just the project name, but that should be enough to get you going.

Please use the mailing lists, or mail me, if you have any opinions about Tree Surgeon. Happy chopping!