Search for command with wildcard

Question

I did some research, but unfortunately my question was never answered. The closest question to mine is this: Search for bash command

What I need: A command to search for installed commands using wildcards. Let's say I want to unmount something but forgot the command. I know it contains "mount". So I would do something like this:

searchfor *mount*

To find that unmount is the command I need. I know man -k or yum whatprovides. But that's not what I'm looking for. I want to search for all installed commands (that can be found in the directories provided by the $PATH variable).

A bit more clarity is needed. Do you want to search for commands installed via .rpm packages or shell builtins? If so, apropos will do that and you don't need wildcards. — Nasir Riley, Apr 01 '18 at 19:29
Commands installed by yum (CentOS) or apt-get (ubuntu). Okay, apropos is very close to my needs but not 100% what I asked for. Thanks anyway! — Daniel Hoop, Apr 01 '18 at 19:42

score 14 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 02 '18 at 05:42

My favorite way is to use compgen -c. For example, to find all commands that contain mount:

$ compgen -c | grep mount
gvfs-mount
mmount
ideviceimagemounter
grub-mount
humount
hmount
umount
mountpoint
mount
fusermount
umount
mount.ntfs
mount.lowntfs-3g
mount.cifs
umount.udisks
mount.nfs
umount.nfs
mount
mount.ntfs-3g
mount.fuse
showmount
rpc.mountd
mountesp
umount.udisks2
mountstats
automount

What's good about compgen -c is that it also finds aliases, user functions and Bash built-in commands, for example:

$ alias aoeuidhtn='echo hi'
$ compgen -c | grep aoeuidhtn
aoeuidhtn
$ my-great-function() { printf "Inside great function()\n"; }
$ compgen -c | grep great
my-great-function
$ compgen -c | grep '^cd$'
cd

Also, compgen is a part of Bash, so it's always available. As described by help compgen:

Display possible completions depending on the options.

Intended to be used from within a shell function generating possible completions. If the optional WORD argument is supplied, matches against WORD are generated.

Exit Status:
Returns success unless an invalid option is supplied or an error occurs.

Great, thanks! That's exactely what I was looking for. P.S. Thanks also for all the other answers. You guys are amazing! :-) — Daniel Hoop, Apr 01 '18 at 20:04
grep is a great tool, and it certainly can be useful in conjunction with compgen -c — for example, in the case of compgen -c | grep mount — but read the help text. If you know the beginning of the command name, you can say compgen -c aoeuidhtn or compgen -c aoeui. — Scott - Слава Україні, Apr 02 '18 at 05:52
When using the Z shell, you can use analogously hash | grep command, where hash prints the command hash table, which holds all executables inside $PATH. — mpy, Apr 02 '18 at 10:59

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 01 '18 at 19:25

#! /bin/bash
s=$1  # e.g. mount
IFS=:
for p in $PATH ; do
    ls "$p/"*"$s"* 2>/dev/null
done

Setting $IFS to : makes the for correctly iterate over the members of $PATH. Redirecting stderr to /dev/null hides error messages for directories that contain no matches.

Bharat · Answer 3 · 2018-04-05T10:20:16.867

1

It can be done in many different ways, look up in $PATH paths, use locate command etc..

 find $(echo $PATH|tr ':' ' ') -maxdepth 1 -name '*mount*'

edited Apr 05 '18 at 10:20

answered Apr 01 '18 at 19:41

Bharat

814

3

with -maxdepth 1 – Hauke Laging Apr 01 '18 at 20:18
And -mindepth 1 – wjandrea Apr 02 '18 at 04:49
If any of the dirs in your PATH are symlinks, you need to use find -H – wjandrea Apr 02 '18 at 05:13

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 01 '18 at 11:21

For the record, in zsh:

type -m '*mount*'

Will find all matches and for each, report what (executable, function, alias...) and where they are.

$ type -m 'zc*'
zc is an alias for zcalc
zcalc is an autoload shell function
zcompile is a shell builtin
zcat is /bin/zcat
zcmp is /bin/zcmp

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 02 '18 at 04:48

This is based choroba's answer, but only uses Bash features (written for GNU Bash 4.3.11). It returns success if any matches are found, failure otherwise.

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob
s="${1:?}"  # Error if argument is missing or null.
exit=1  # Return failure unless changed.
IFS=:
for p in $PATH; do
    for f in "$p/"*"$s"*; do
        if [[ -f $f ]]; then
            echo "$f"
            exit=0  # Return success since match found.
        fi
    done
done
exit $exit

Search for command with wildcard

5 Answers5

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