file-search

What This Skill Does

The file-search skill provides a high-performance interface for searching through files and their contents within the OpenClaw AI agent environment. By leveraging industry-standard tools like fd (a fast alternative to find) and rg (ripgrep, a line-oriented search tool), this skill enables users to locate files by name or analyze large codebases by scanning file contents for specific patterns, keywords, or regex matches. It is designed to minimize latency, making it ideal for developers or researchers working with massive file directories.

Installation

To install this skill, use the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/xejrax/file-search

Ensure that the underlying dependencies are installed on your system. On Fedora-based systems, you can run: sudo dnf install fd-find ripgrep

Use Cases

This skill is highly versatile and serves several primary use cases:

1. Project Navigation: Rapidly finding configuration files or source code files by name when working in complex repository structures.
2. Code Auditing: Quickly searching through an entire project for "TODO" items, deprecated function calls, or hardcoded sensitive information.
3. Log Analysis: Filtering through server logs or system output files using regex patterns to pinpoint specific error codes or timestamped events.
4. Refactoring Support: Identifying every occurrence of a variable or method name across a codebase to ensure comprehensive updates.

Example Prompts

1. "Find all Rust files containing the term 'database_connection' in my project folder at /home/user/workspace/app."
2. "Locate all files named 'README.md' across my documentation directory and list their paths."
3. "Search for the string 'API_KEY' in the src directory and provide 3 lines of context for each match."

Tips & Limitations

• Performance: Because rg and fd are highly optimized, they are extremely fast, but searching the entire root directory (/) can still consume system resources; try to scope your search paths.
• Regex Power: Ripgrep supports advanced PCRE2 features; use them to create complex, multi-pattern queries for sophisticated content discovery.
• Ignoring Files: fd and rg automatically respect your .gitignore files by default, which is usually helpful. If you need to search ignored files, use the appropriate flags (like --hidden or --no-ignore) within the tool arguments.