04d - IFS (EN)

IFS – Find files and directories in your IFS

Last Updated on 3 October 2021 by Roberto De Pedrini

I take advantage of a question asked on the Midrange.com discussion groups ( Is there an easy way to find a file in IFS? ) to summarize, in this post, some different ways to search for a file within one or more IFS directories. The specific question was … “is there something to look for in IFS objects like WRKOBJ command we use in IBM i environment in QSYS library?”

If we “navigate” in our IFS starting from QSH, remember that we are in a world very similar to Linux and therefore several Linux commands work very well here too!

Suppose we have one IFS directory “/ f4docs” where there are thousands of files and subfolders. Let’s see different types of research and the different possibilities we have from the IBM i environment or from QSH:

1 – FIND command from QSH or SSH: we see in this a search of all the files in the directory “/ f4docs” of type “.TXT” with the name containing “02342” … including any subdirectories

find /f4docs -name "*02432*.TXT"

2 – FIND + GREP command from QSH or SSH: the problem with FIND is that it is always case-sensitive in QSH environment … if we need to filter only certain files not taking into account the “case” character:

find /f4docs -type f -name "*02432*" | grep ".txt" -i    

3 – Command FIND + GREP (to also search inside the contents of the fil es), from QH and SSH: by slightly modifying the syntax of the GREP part, it is also possible to search for files with a certain content (in this case the string “MOTO”

find /f4docs -name "*.TXT" -exec grep -l 'MOTO' {};

4 – With SQL and QSYS2.IFS_OBJECT_STATISTICS : an interesting alternative to search for IFS files and objects is SQL with IBM i Services … in particular QSYS2.IFS_OBJECT_STATISTICS

Select * from Table (QSYS2.IFS_Object_Statistics (Start_Path_Name => '/ f4docs', Subtree_Directories => 'YES')) x Where Lower (Path_Name) like '% 02432%';

5 – With RTVDIRINF and SQL on the created catalog tables:



// first, delete RTVDIRINF result tables

DLTF QSURSYS/QAEZD0001I
MONMSG MSGID(CPF0000)
DLTF QSURSYS/QAEZD0001D
MONMSG MSGID(CPF0000)
DLTF QSURSYS/QAEZD0001O
MONMSG MSGID(CPF0000)

// then collect data from your directoy

RTVDIRINF DIR('/f4docs')

// and search your files
 
SELECT o.Qezalcsize
        ,SUBSTR(o.Qezobjnam, 1, 40)
        ,d.Qezdirnam1
     FROM qusrsys.Qaezd0001o o
          INNER JOIN qusrsys.Qaezd0001d d
               ON o.Qezdiridx = d.Qezdiridx
     WHERE 1=1
     and qezobjtype='*STMF'
     and UPPER(o.Qezobjnam) LIKE '%02432%'
     ORDER BY o.Qezalcsize DESC;

6 – With Powershell and Findstr if the IFS directory is shared – share: if we want to search inside the contents of the files from Windows, we can use the PowerShell and the Findstr command, pointing to a shared IFS directory … with a really interesting speed. If we want, for example, to search for files that contain the word “MOTO” …. as in example 3 above, but using FINDSR the syntax is as follows:

findstr /s /i /c:"MOTO" \\myIBMi\f4docs\*.TXT 
/s search in al subdirectories 
/i case insensitive 
/c: search string

7 – Updatedb and Locate, open source utility from the Linux world … they allow a quick search using all the potential of regular expressions.

updatedb -l0 -U /f4docs -o /tmp/myindex 
locate -d /tmp/myindex 02342

Other useful examples

01 Find all files starting with a number

How to list all files that not starting with a number (“myfile.txt” ok, “210021.txt” not ok)

ls | grep -v '^[0-9]'

02 Find all empty IFS directories

The “find” command coming with Qshell is not so good. If you want a better “find” command, better install the GNU findutils version!

-- Once only
yum install findutils

-- then, if you are looking for empty directories
find /home/faq400/ -type d -empty
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--- Roberto De Pedrini Faq400.com
About author

Founder of Faq400 Srl, IBM Champion, creator of Faq400.com and blog.faq400.com web sites. RPG developer since I was wearing shorts, strong IBM i supporter, I have always tried to share my knowledge with others through forums, events and courses. Now, with my company Faq400 Srl, I help companies to make the most of this great platform IBM i.

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