I often found myself searching for files in my current directory, and while find . -iname "*file*" is great for recursive searching, and ls | grep [PATTERN] works, I kept having to chain shell commands together to get the exact behavior I wanted. Rather than creating a bunch of aliases, I decided to make life easier and just create a script that handled the options for me.

From your terminal, clone the repository where you want it.

git clone https://github.com/evanthegrayt/list-and-grep.git

If you have rake installed (gem install rake), from inside the base repository directory, run:

rake

This will link the executable in your path (/usr/local/bin). If you aren't using rake, you can link the executable yourself. From inside the base repository directory, run:

ln -s $PWD/bin/lsg /usr/local/bin/lsg

Just pass the search pattern as an argument.

lsg [PATTERN]

To see a list of behavior-modifying options, run lsg -h, or for the manual, run lsg --man.

You can create a file called ~/.lsgrc to configure the way the script behaves. Currently, the only configurations are for the output color. Just be forewarned, enabling color could considerably increase run-time when the directory contains a very large amount of entries.

use_color: true        # Use colored output? (default: false)
color:     "\e[1;92m"  # The color used when showing matches (default: green)

Note that you are able to enable/disable colored output at runtime with the --[no-]color option, which will override the boolean in the configuration file.

I do these projects for fun, and I enjoy knowing that they're helpful to people. Consider starring the repository if you like it! If you love it, follow me on github!