Is there a tool for indexing a directory in order to perform cheap content search? (hashing by word, for example)

Question

I am often using grep -R on an entire directory tree to find all files that contains a specified word. I wonder if there is a tool that makes the whole operation much faster, maybe via hashing? (Unix systems!). Even better if it exists to optimize regular expressions matching.

thanks! -Francesco

thanks for the suggestion. Do you have any example on how to use it via command-line? — fstab, Sep 27 '13 at 12:48
From the documentation: "Lucene is not a complete application, but rather a code library and API that can easily be used to add search capabilities to applications." — Dennis Williamson, Sep 27 '13 at 15:03
So he was suggesting me to write my own tool with lucene! :D — fstab, Sep 28 '13 at 14:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 16 '13 at 00:50

I don't know of any tool that does this, other than grep or find. You might gain speed using find, possibly in conjuction with xargs, to search only those kinds of files that are of interest (skipping binary files, for example.) This would be my next step, run "time" on your grep, and then run "time" on your find command, and compare results.

Is there a tool for indexing a directory in order to perform cheap content search? (hashing by word, for example)

1 Answers1