Filters

Flam lets you easily apply a filter when you search for findables. Filters can be very simple:

# Filter directors to only ones named tarantino.
flam find director -name tarantino

Or more complex:

# Find only movies released since 1980 and which contain at least one actor who was in either Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.
flam find movies -release-year +1980 -any-role cast [ -movies lord.of.the.rings -o -movies star.wars ]

Filters are essentially a combination of predicates. Each predicate checks one thing about the findable object. By default predicates are joined together using AND (i.e., -pred1 -pred2 means “pred1 AND pred2”), but filters support all the standard features you’d expect:

• AND: &, -a, -and

  This is the default

• OR: |, -o, -or

  -pred1 -or -pred2

• NOT: !, -n, -not

  -not -pred

• Parentheses: [ ], ( ), -lparen -rparen

  Control the order of operations: [ -pred1 -pred2 ] -or [ -pred3 -pred4 ]

Tip

Click here to read more about predicates and see a list of all builtin predicates.

Formal syntax

Below is the formal syntax for filters. Note that filters are case-sensitive!

FILTER    := PIPELINE | <epsilon>
PIPELINE  := SINGLE JOINABLE*
SINGLE    := NEGATIVE | POSITIVE
POSITIVE  := PREDICATE | [ PIPELINE ]
NEGATIVE  := NOT POSITIVE
JOINABLE  := CONJOINED | DISJOINED | SINGLE
CONJOINED := AND SINGLE
DISJOINED := OR SINGLE
PREDICATE := -<name> <arg1> <arg2>...

OR        := -o | -or  | `|`
AND       := -a | -and | &
NOT       := -n | -not | !
[         := [  | (    | -lparen
]         := ]  | )    | -rparen