Emacs: how to find a variable by its value?

Question

I have some value and know that some Emacs variable holds it. How to find, which variable has this value in it? The value can be a symbol, integer or string, and the variable may hold the value itself, but a list which contains a value.

Example. A variable default-directory contains string "/var/www/". I have that string, but i suddenly forgot the variable's name. How do i search through variables and find that default-directory contains that string?

Is there some builtin function for that, or the only solution is custom elisp snippet?

score 18 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 19 '12 at 14:14

18

M-x apropos-value RET ^"/var/www/"$ RET

answered Mar 19 '12 at 14:14

yibe

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score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 19 '12 at 14:14

4

The required command is apropos-value.

answered Mar 19 '12 at 14:14

event_jr

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Emacs: how to find a variable by its value?

2 Answers2