How to create qf or location list from results of shell command

Question

I often open the results of an external project-wide find | xargs grep command into a new tab like this :tabnew|read !find . -iname \*.py | xargs grep -n 'pattern'

I then use gf to open the matching files and perform edits. While this is handy, the file opens with the cursor on the top-most line of the file.

I want to be able to jump directly to the exact line as indicated by the results (note the use of grep -n to include line numbers in the results).

Is it possible to "promote" or "convert" the results of the command to a quickfix or location list?

Or, conversely, is there a command other than gf that will jump to not only the file but the exact line in the file as indicated by the results?

[Edit: I know of :vimgrep /pattern/ **/*.py but I don't know how to tell it not to follow symlinks (whereas find won't follow links unless -L is specified). There's also the problem of ** exhausting the command buffer if there are too many files... hence why I use find | xargs grep.]

Answer 1

The gF command is jumping at a specific line within the file.

It open the file at the number specified after the file name where the file name and the line number are separated by a non isfname character.

Your grep result need to be adapted accordingly.

Answer 2

To answer your question more directly, you can use :help :cexpr or :help :cgetexpr in combination with :help system() to populate the quickfix:

:cexpr system("find . -iname \*.py | xargs grep -n 'pattern'")

Once the quickfix is populated, you can use :help :cn, :help :cp, :help :cc, etc. to move around and/or open the quickfix window with :help :cwindow: