It's really fitting to have a supremely technical and focused tool like this be described with things like "pretty C expressions" and (my favorite) "it's like find(1), but more fun to use", because obviously writing low-level C-like expressions to match against files is fun, most of all. Love it.
Also some of the examples are truly powerful, and at least I was not aware of any tool that could do things like this:
# Find executable files that are larger than 10KiB, and have not been executed in the last 24 hours:
anyx && sz > 10K && atime < ago(day)
# Find regular files with multiple hard links
f && nlink > 1
# Find symlinks whose ultimate targets are on a different filesystem:
texists && tdev != dev
Many of the examples feel liks "I would never need that"-territory, until you do and then it's like impossible unless you write your own specialized tool to do it, or reach for this. Very cool!
Authors: 1990 Ken Stauffer, 2022 raf <raf@raf.org>
I’m bummed I didn’t know about it. The variety of output options is amazing.
Do you happen to know why it was called rawhide? I'm very curious.
Btw, its not related to RedHat or Fedora Rawhide.
Hello Robert if you're reading this.
Others, have a look at libslack too.
Ah, I see: https://github.com/raforg/rawhide/commits/main A bit more cleanup and handy aliases also.
The were many changes. The search criteria language evolved. More search criteria were added. It now can do everything GNU find(1) can do (except filesystem type names), as well as searching by all/more of the inode/stat metadata, and access control lists ("POSIX", NFSv4, and macOS ones), and extended attributes (names and values), and (soon in v3.1) Linux ext2-style file attributes (like immutable and append-only). And it's thoroughly documented and tested. And the standard library of search terms wasn't there before. And of course, it now handles regular expressions, but only perl-compatible ones, because they are the most fun. The output options were expanded a lot based on GNU find (-printf) and GNU ls and json.
But it is almost completely backwards-compatible! Except that "NOW" is now called "now", and the -r option is slightly different (it was -M1, now it's -m1 -M1), and it no longer defaults to reading search criteria from stdin.
The original rawhide v2 is at https://github.com/rafarc/rawhide if you'd like to see it.
But, if you find yourself wanting something like this, and don't want to install anything new... Here's something close in Perl that uses File::stat (this ships with Perl):
find . -print | perl -MFile::stat -nE 'chomp;$s=stat($_);$s->nlink > 1 && say'I use that occasionally when coding up hairy `find` invocations.