29 March 2016

This came up while I was doing a refactoring that reached across multiple files. I wanted a way to make some change, then run all of the tests that contain any reference to a particular method.

TL;DR

Replace <pattern> with your search term.

ack <pattern> test/ -l | xargs -I{} ruby -I"lib:test" {}

Explanation

To break this apart a little bit, I knew that you can get ack to give you a list of file names that match a pattern by passing it the -l option. So that first clause is pretty straightforward – look for <pattern> inside files in the test/ directory, and give me back a list of file names.

ack <pattern> test/ -l

I’m used to using this command to run a single test:

TEST=<filepath> rake test

However, in order to get this working with xargs, I had to switch to the slighlty uglier version (which, if you look, is what rake is doing internally anyway):

ruby -I"lib:test" <filepath>

xarg’s -I argument basically just lets you specify where an argument fits inside shell command that’s receiving it. In this case, {} in ruby -I"lib:test" {} gets replaced once in succession by each of the file names we found in the first clause with ack.