Quick finds in the Current Directory (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition)

9.26. Quick finds in the Current Directory

find -prune prunes find's search tree at the current pathname. Here are a couple of aliases that use -prune to search for files in the current directory. The first one, named find. (with a dot on the end of its name, to remind you of ., the relative pathname for the current directory), simply prints names with -print. The second alias gives a listing like ls -gilds. You can add other find operators to the command lines to narrow your selection of files. The aliases work like this:

% find. -mtime -1
./afile
./cfile
% find.ls -mtime -1
43073   0 -r--------  1 jerry    ora        0 Mar 27 18:16 ./afile
43139   2 -r--r--r--  1 jerry    ora     1025 Mar 24 02:33 ./cfile

The find. alias is handy inside backquotes, feeding a pipe, and other places you need a list of filenames. The second one, find.ls, uses -ls instead of -print:

alias find. 'find . \( -type d ! -name . -prune \) -o \( \!* -print \)'
alias find.ls 'find . \( -type d ! -name . -prune \) -o \( \!* -ls \)'

If you don't want the ./ at the start of each name, add a pipe through cut -c3- or cut -d'/' -f2- to the end of the alias definition.

-- JP