A utility to recursively search for files by name in a filesystem, also looking inside archives to an arbitary depth.
Supported archives are: TAR, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2 and ZIP. It should also work on ZIP-like archives such as JAR files. There are options for case sensitivity, glob-style pattern matching and JSON output. Non-ASCII character sets should be supported, although there may be some issues with command line encodings if they aren't UTF-8 (and there's also the fact that ZIP files don't have a universally accepted encoding).
The script uses the "magic" library to determine file types, so it doesn't rely on file extensions to identify archives.
Download the "arkfind" script. Make it executable to run it like ./arkfind
or run it with python ./arkfind.
Dependencies:
- Python (>= 2.7)
- python-magic (>= 0.4.3) (installable via pip)
Say that over years of different backup regimes and ad-hoc archiving you've ended up with TAR files inside ZIP files, and there are many such ZIP files all inside one big TAR.BZ2 file. You want to find a file called "magic.txt", so you use the script like so:
$ arkfind AllBackups.tar.bz2 "magic.txt"
AllBackups.tar.bz2
> backups_2006/lab_pc/MISC.zip
> misc_lab_stuff/magic.txt
Maybe you have a directory full of such archives, and you can't remember the whole name of the file. You can do this:
$ arkfind -g backups/ "magic*.*"
backups/backup_2007.zip
> 06/magic_june_2007.rtf
backups/backup_2008.zip
> 01/magic_jan_2008.html