Homework assignment HW13

Homework log

Remember to create a new post with a new topic “HW13” in your homework log channel on Microsoft Teams. Make a reply to that topic whenever do some work on this assignment. You can also post questions there. Your posts should provide evidence that you spent several hours doing meaningful work.

Objectives

This assignment covers the use of the Unix tools find and grep, and the utility ripgrep (a faster and more developer-friendly version of grep). You will learn how to use these tools to search for files and text in files, and how to use regular expressions to perform more complex searches.

Minimal knowledge and experience to acquire include the following:

• Use the find command to search for files matching a given name or pattern e.g. find . -name "*.txt" to find all text files in the current directory and its subdirectories.
• Use the find command to search for directories matching a given name or pattern e.g. find . -type d -name "src" to find all directories named src in the current directory and its subdirectories.
• Use the grep command to search for text in files e.g. grep "TODO" *.py to find all occurrences of the string “TODO” in Python files in the current directory.
• Use the ripgrep command to search for text in files e.g. rg "TODO" -t py to find all occurrences of the string “TODO” in Python files in the current directory and subdirectories recursively.
• Use regular expressions with grep and ripgrep to perform more complex searches e.g. grep -E "TODO|FIXME" *.py to find all occurrences of the strings “TODO” or “FIXME” in Python files in the current directory.

PB version

The Professor Braught version is available as:

• 13-A-NavigatingCode.docx You are free to follow this version closely if desired, or use it as a loose guide to your activities.

Likely quiz questions

Give Linux terminal commands Using standard Unix utilities (i.e. not ripgrep) that perform the following actions:

• Find all files in the current directory and its subdirectories that have the extension .md.
• Find all directories in the current directory and its subdirectories that have the name src.
• Search for the string “my_function” in all Java files in the current directory and its subdirectories.
• Search for the strings of the form “date 03-17-2026” in all Python files in the current directory and its subdirectories, where the date can be any date in June 2025 (i.e. any date of the form “date 06-xx-2025” where xx is a number from 01 to 30). Give a ripgrep command that performs the following action:
• Search for the string “my_function” in all Java files in the current directory and its subdirectories.