Facebook PathPicker is a simple command line tool that solves the perpetual problem of selecting files out of bash output. PathPicker will:

• Parse all incoming lines for entries that look like files
• Present the piped input in a convenient selector UI
• Allow you to either:
  • Edit the selected files in your favorite $EDITOR
  • Execute an arbitrary command with them

It is easiest to understand by watching a simple demo:

After installing PathPicker, using it is as easy as piping into fpp. It takes a wide variety of input -- try it with all the options below:

• git status | fpp
• hg status | fpp
• git grep "FooBar" | fpp
• grep -r "FooBar" . | fpp
• git diff HEAD~1 --stat | fpp
• find . -iname "*.js" | fpp
• arc inlines | fpp

and anything else you can dream up!

PathPicker should work with most Bash environments and requires Python >2.6 and <3.0.

ZSH is supported as well but won't have a few features like alias expansion in command line mode.

Installing PathPicker is easiest with Homebrew for mac:

• brew update (to pull down the recipe since it is new)
• brew install fpp

You can easily install PathPicker from the GitHub master branch via the AUR fpp-git package. For non-Arch users, see the manual installation instructions below:

However if you're on a system without Homebrew, it's still quite easy to install PathPicker since it's essentially just a bash script that calls some Python. These steps more-or-less outline the process:

• cd /usr/local/ # or wherever you install apps
• git clone git@github.com:facebook/PathPicker.git
• cd PathPicker/

Here we make a symbolic link from the bash script in the repo to /usr/local/bin/ which is assumed to be in the current $PATH

• ln -s "$(pwd)/fpp" /usr/local/bin/fpp
• fpp --help # should work!

For tmux users, you can additionally install tmux-fpp which adds a key combination to run PathPicker on the last received stdout. It makes jumping into file selection mode even easier -- check it out here.

As mentioned above, PathPicker allows you to also execute arbitrary commands with the specified files. Here is an example showing a git checkout command executed against the selected files:

The selected files are appended to the command prefix to form the final command. If you need the files in the middle of your command, you can use the $F token instead, like:

cat $F | wc -l

PathPicker is a combination of a bash script and some small Python modules. It essentially has three steps:

• First in the bash script, it redirects all standardout in to a python module that parses and extracts out the filenames. This data is saved in a temporary file and the python script exits.
• Next, the bash script switches to terminal input mode and another python module reads out the saved entries and presents them in a selector UI built with curses. The user either selects a few files to edit or inputs a command to execute.
• Lastly, the python script outputs a command to a bash file that is later executed by the original bash script.

It's not the most elegant architecture in the world but (in our opinion) provides a lot of utility.

For all documentation and configuration options, see the output of fpp --help.

See the CONTRIBUTING file for how to help out.

PathPicker is BSD-licensed. We also provide an additional patent grant.