Search your code using pss

Searching the code base is something developers do every day. From fixing bugs to learning new code or seeing how to call an API, the ability to quickly navigate your code base is a big help. Fortunately, we have specialized tools for searching code. pss[1] is one of these tools, let's take a look at how to install and use it.

What is pss?

pss is a command line tool that helps you search in source code files. pss Search recursively in the directory tree. It can automatically determine which files need to be searched and which files do not need to be searched based on the file name and suffix, and will automatically skip those directories that you do not want to search (such as .svn and .git), and can also render the output in color to make it easier for people to read, and many other functions.

Install pss

Use the following command to install pss on Fedora:

 $ dnf install pss

After installation, you can call pss in the terminal:

 $ pss

Calling pss without parameters or with the -h flag will output detailed instructions.

Use Cases

Now that you have pss installed, let’s look at some examples.

 $ pss foo

This command simply searches for foo. You can also restrict pss so that it only searches for foo in python files:

 $ pss foo --py

You can also search in non-python files bar:

 $ pss bar --nopy

Furthermore, pss supports most common source code file types. To get a complete list of support, execute:

$ pss --help-types

You can also specify to ignore certain directories and not search. By default, pss will ignore directories like .git, __pycache__, .metadata, etc.

$ pss foo --py --ignore-dir=dist

In addition, pss can also display the context of search results.

$ pss -A 5 foo

The next 5 lines of the matching result will be displayed.

$ pss -B 5 foo

The first 5 lines of the matching result will be displayed.

$ pss -C 5 foo

The 5 lines before and after the matching result will be displayed.

If you want to know how to use pss for regular expression search and its other options, you can see more examples here [2].

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