Can ack find files based on filename only?

Question

Using ack (sometimes packaged as ack-grep) I know that I can find paths that contain a specific string by doing:
ack -g somestring

But what if I only want files which have "somestring" in their filenames?

Answer 1

I agree find is the way to go, but you could also easily do it with ack:

ack -f | ack "string" 

Here, "ack -f" recursively lists all the files it would search; pipe that to the second ack command to search through that. ack -f does have the advantage of skipping over binaries and directories even without any more arguments; often, then a "find" command could be replaced by a much shorter "ack" command.

Answer 2

You can use find utility. Something like this:

find /path/to/look/in -name '*somestring*' -print 

On some systems, if you omit the path, current directory is used. On other systems you can't omit it, just use . for current directory instead.

Also, read man find for many other options.