I am trying to find a specific line in files that contains "Mutual_Values_23.0" in a directory that contains a lot of subdirectories. I know this line number is stored in a file which starts with "gnuout_mutual_....txt" (the ellipses part of the file name is the time stamp so that varies).
I wanted to know if there is a way to specify "grep" command to look into the subdirectories only for the files starting with "gnuout_mutual_....txt"
I have tried
grep -r "Mutual_Values_23.0" *
but that's taking a long time
You can use the following option of grep:
--include=GLOB
Search only files whose base name matches GLOB (using wildcard matching as described under --exclude).
And for the line number you should use the -n option.
From within the root of the folders you want to look into, you can use this final command:
grep -nr "Mutual_Values_23.0" --include="gnuout_mutual_*txt"
Use find to search all sub-directories for the "gnuout...txt` file with the search string "Mutual_Values_23.0"
find . -mindepth 1 -name gnuout_mutual_\*.txt -type f -exec grep "Mutual_Values_23.0" {} +
If you make use of bash, you can use the globstar option:
globstar
If set, the pattern ** used in a pathname expansion context will
match all files and zero or more directories and subdirectories.
If the pattern is followed by a /, only directories and
subdirectories match.
So you can use it like:
$ shopt -s globstar
$ grep "search_string" **/glob-pattern
or in the case of the OP:
$ shopt -s globstar
$ grep Mutual_Values_23.0 **/gnuout_mutual_*.txt
GNU grep has the --include GLOB option where GLOB can be used to specify the file name pattern that you need to match.
grep -rn --include 'gnuout_mutual_*txt' 'Mutual_Values_23.0' .
You could use find to search for files and pass results to grep.
find /directory_where_to_search/ -iname 'gnuout_mutual_*.txt' | xargs grep 'Mutual_Values_23.0' -sl
Use this command:
$ find . -name "*Mutual_Values_23.0*"
Note: Run this command in the directory where you want to search your set of files.
Hope it helps, cheers!
Related
This command find all files name "log_7" recursively in current folder.
find . -name log_7
Assume many sub-folders under the current folder tree has a file with that same name "log_7":
./am/f1/log_7
./ke/f2/log_7
./sa/f6/log_7
..
./xx/f97/log_7
Is there a way to explicitly say that we only want to search for "log_7" in a folder name "f2" ? such that the result from find will only list only one entry:
./ke/f2/log_7
You could use a regular expression.
find . -regex '.*/f2/log_7'
This will only match if log_7 is directly nested under f2
There is a different way is to use xargs for same thing
find . -name filename | xargs grep -e refectory
But find with built in regex is preferable.
Simple glob should do:
printf '%s\n' */f2/log_7
If there is a possibility for more leading folders, you can use the globstar option:
shopt -s globstar
printf '%s\n' **/f2/log_7
I need to recursively search for a specified string within all files and subdirectories within a directory and replace this string with another string.
I know that the command to find it might look like this:
grep 'string_to_find' -r ./*
But how can I replace every instance of string_to_find with another string?
Another option is to use find and then pass it through sed.
find /path/to/files -type f -exec sed -i 's/oldstring/new string/g' {} \;
I got the answer.
grep -rl matchstring somedir/ | xargs sed -i 's/string1/string2/g'
You could even do it like this:
Example
grep -rl 'windows' ./ | xargs sed -i 's/windows/linux/g'
This will search for the string 'windows' in all files relative to the current directory and replace 'windows' with 'linux' for each occurrence of the string in each file.
This works best for me on OS X:
grep -r -l 'searchtext' . | sort | uniq | xargs perl -e "s/matchtext/replacetext/" -pi
Source: http://www.praj.com.au/post/23691181208/grep-replace-text-string-in-files
Usually not with grep, but rather with sed -i 's/string_to_find/another_string/g' or perl -i.bak -pe 's/string_to_find/another_string/g'.
Other solutions mix regex syntaxes. To use perl/PCRE patterns for both search and replace, and process only matching files, this works quite well:
grep -rlIZPi 'match1' | xargs -0r perl -pi -e 's/match2/replace/gi;'
match1 and match2 are usually identical but match2 can contain more advanced features that are only relevant to the substitution, e.g. capturing groups.
Translation: grep recursively and list matching filenames, each separated by null to protect any special characters; pipe any filenames to xargs which is expecting a null-separated list; if any filenames are received, pass them to perl to perform the actual substitutions.
For case-sensitive matching, drop the i flag from grep and the i pattern modifier from the s/// expression, but not the i flag from perl itself. To include binary files, remove the I flag from grep.
Be very careful when using find and sed in a git repo! If you don't exclude the binary files you can end up with this error:
error: bad index file sha1 signature
fatal: index file corrupt
To solve this error you need to revert the sed by replacing your new_string with your old_string. This will revert your replaced strings, so you will be back to the beginning of the problem.
The correct way to search for a string and replace it is to skip find and use grep instead in order to ignore the binary files:
sed -ri -e "s/old_string/new_string/g" $(grep -Elr --binary-files=without-match "old_string" "/files_dir")
Credits for #hobs
Here is what I would do:
find /path/to/dir -type f -iname "*filename*" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '/searchstring/s/old/new/g'
this will look for all files containing filename in the file's name under the /path/to/dir, than for every file found, search for the line with searchstring and replace old with new.
Though if you want to omit looking for a specific file with a filename string in the file's name, than simply do:
find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '/searchstring/s/old/new/g'
This will do the same thing above, but to all files found under /path/to/dir.
Modern rust tools can be used to do this job.
For example to replace in all (non ignored) files "oldstring" and "oldString" with "newstring" and "newString" respectively you can :
Use fd and sd
fd -tf -x sd 'old([Ss]tring)' 'new$1' {}
Use ned
ned -R -p 'old([Ss]tring)' -r 'new$1' .
Use ruplacer
ruplacer --go 'old([Ss]tring)' 'new$1' .
Ignored files
To include ignored (by .gitignore) and hidden files you have to specify it :
use -IH for fd,
use --ignored --hiddenfor ruplacer.
Another option would be to just use perl with globstar.
Enabling shopt -s globstar in your .bashrc (or wherever) allows the ** glob pattern to match all sub-directories and files recursively.
Thus using perl -pXe 's/SEARCH/REPLACE/g' -i ** will recursively
replace SEARCH with REPLACE.
The -X flag tells perl to "disable all warnings" - which means that
it won't complain about directories.
The globstar also allows you to do things like sed -i 's/SEARCH/REPLACE/g' **/*.ext if you wanted to replace SEARCH with REPLACE in all child files with the extension .ext.
I have a big list of log files in a particular directory , related to my java Application under my Linux Remote Servers .
When i do ls on that particular directory it shows a list of files (nearly 100 files )
Now in that List of files , i need to find out a particular word , please tell me , how can i do this ??
The problem is that I cannot open each and every file and search for that word using /
Please tell me how can i search for a word in the list of files provided .
You can use this command:
grep -rn "string" *
n for showing line number with the filename
r for recursive
grep is made for this.
Use:
grep myword * for a simple word
grep 'my sentence' * for a literal string
grep "I am ${USER}" * when you need variable replacement
You can also use regular expressions.
Add -r for recursive and -n to show the line number of matching lines.
And check man grep.
This is a very frequent task in linux. I use grep -rn '' . all the time to do this. -r for recursive (folder and subfolders) -n so it gives the line numbers, the dot stands for the current directory.
grep -rn '<word or regex>' <location>
do a
man grep
for more options
also you can try the following.
find . -name '*.java' -exec grep "<yourword" /dev/null {} \;
It gets all the files with .java extension and searches 'yourword' in each file, if it presents, it lists the file.
Hope it helps :)
You could club find with exec as follows to get the list of the files as well as the occurrence of the word/string that you are looking for
find . -exec grep "my word" '{}' \; -print
use this command
grep "your word" searchDirectory/*.log
Get more on this link
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-recursively-search-all-files-for-words/
You are looking for grep command.
You can read 15 Practical Grep Command Examples In Linux / UNIX for some samples.
In Windows, I would have done a search for finding a word inside a folder. Similarly, I want to know if a specific word occurs inside a directory containing many sub-directories and files. My searches for grep syntax shows I must specify the filename, i.e. grep string filename.
Now, I do not know the filename, so what do I do?
A friend suggested to do grep -nr string, but I don't know what this means and I got no results with it (there is no response until I issue a Ctrl + C).
grep -nr 'yourString*' .
The dot at the end searches the current directory. Meaning for each parameter:
-n Show relative line number in the file
'yourString*' String for search, followed by a wildcard character
-r Recursively search subdirectories listed
. Directory for search (current directory)
grep -nr 'MobileAppSer*' . (Would find MobileAppServlet.java or MobileAppServlet.class or MobileAppServlet.txt; 'MobileAppASer*.*' is another way to do the same thing.)
To check more parameters use man grep command.
grep -nr string my_directory
Additional notes: this satisfies the syntax grep [options] string filename because in Unix-like systems, a directory is a kind of file (there is a term "regular file" to specifically refer to entities that are called just "files" in Windows).
grep -nr string reads the content to search from the standard input, that is why it just waits there for input from you, and stops doing so when you press ^C (it would stop on ^D as well, which is the key combination for end-of-file).
GREP: Global Regular Expression Print/Parser/Processor/Program.
You can use this to search the current directory.
You can specify -R for "recursive", which means the program searches in all subfolders, and their subfolders, and their subfolder's subfolders, etc.
grep -R "your word" .
-n will print the line number, where it matched in the file.
-i will search case-insensitive (capital/non-capital letters).
grep -inR "your regex pattern" .
There's also:
find directory_name -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -li word
but that might be a bit much for a beginner.
find is a general purpose directory walker/lister, -type f means "look for plain files rather than directories and named pipes and what have you", -print0 means "print them on the standard output using null characters as delimiters". The output from find is sent to xargs -0 and that grabs its standard input in chunks (to avoid command line length limitations) using null characters as a record separator (rather than the standard newline) and then applies grep -li word to each set of files. On the grep, -l means "list the files that match" and -i means "case insensitive"; you can usually combine single character options so you'll see -li more often than -l -i.
If you don't use -print0 and -0 then you'll run into problems with file names that contain spaces so using them is a good habit.
grep -nr search_string search_dir
will do a RECURSIVE (meaning the directory and all it's sub-directories) search for the search_string. (as correctly answered by usta).
The reason you were not getting any anwers with your friend's suggestion of:
grep -nr string
is because no directory was specified. If you are in the directory that you want to do the search in, you have to do the following:
grep -nr string .
It is important to include the '.' character, as this tells grep to search THIS directory.
Why not do a recursive search to find all instances in sub directories:
grep -r 'text' *
This works like a charm.
Similar to the answer posted by #eLRuLL, an easier way to specify a search that respects word boundaries is to use the -w option:
grep -wnr "yourString" .
Another option that I like to use:
find folder_name -type f -exec grep your_text {} \;
-type f returns you only files and not folders
-exec and {} runs the grep on the files that were found in the search (the exact syntax is "-exec command {}").
grep -r "yourstring" *
Will find "yourstring" in any files and folders
Now if you want to look for two different strings at the same time you can always use option E and add words for the search. example after the break
grep -rE "yourstring|yourotherstring|$" * will search for list locations where yourstring or yourotherstring matches
The answer you selected is fine, and it works, but it isn't the correct way to do it, because:
grep -nr yourString* .
This actually searches the string "yourStrin" and "g" 0 or many times.
So the proper way to do it is:
grep -nr \w*yourString\w* .
This command searches the string with any character before and after on the current folder.
grep -R "string" /directory/
-R follows also symlinks when -r does not.
The following sample looks recursively for your search string in the *.xml and *.js files located somewhere inside the folders path1, path2 and path3.
grep -r --include=*.xml --include=*.js "your search string" path1 path2 path3
So you can search in a subset of the files for many directories, just providing the paths at the end.
Run(terminal) the following command inside the directory. It will recursively check inside subdirectories too.
grep -r 'your string goes here' *
Don't use grep. Download Silver Searcher or ripgrep. They're both outstanding, and way faster than grep or ack with tons of options.
How can we find specific type of files i.e. doc pdf files present in nested directories.
command I tried:
$ ls -R | grep .doc
but if there is a file name like alok.doc.txt the command will display that too which is obviously not what I want. What command should I use instead?
If you are more confortable with "ls" and "grep", you can do what you want using a regular expression in the grep command (the ending '$' character indicates that .doc must be at the end of the line. That will exclude "file.doc.txt"):
ls -R |grep "\.doc$"
More information about using grep with regular expressions in the man.
ls command output is mainly intended for reading by humans. For advanced querying for automated processing, you should use more powerful find command:
find /path -type f \( -iname "*.doc" -o -iname "*.pdf" \)
As if you have bash 4.0++
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
shopt -s nullglob
for file in **/*.{pdf,doc}
do
echo "$file"
done
find . | grep "\.doc$"
This will show the path as well.
Some of the other methods that can be used:
echo *.{pdf,docx,jpeg}
stat -c %n * | grep 'pdf\|docx\|jpeg'
We had a similar question. We wanted a list - with paths - of all the config files in the etc directory. This worked:
find /etc -type f \( -iname "*.conf" \)
It gives a nice list of all the .conf file with their path. Output looks like:
/etc/conf/server.conf
But, we wanted to DO something with ALL those files, like grep those files to find a word, or setting, in all the files. So we use
find /etc -type f \( -iname "*.conf" \) -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Hi "ServerName"
to find via grep ALL the config files in /etc that contain a setting like "ServerName" Output looks like:
/etc/conf/server.conf: ServerName "default-118_11_170_172"
Hope you find it useful.
Sid
Similarly if you prefer using the wildcard character * (not quite like the regex suggestions) you can just use ls with both the -l flag to list one file per line (like grep) and the -R flag like you had. Then you can specify the files you want to search for with *.doc
I.E. Either
ls -l -R *.doc
or if you want it to list the files on fewer lines.
ls -R *.doc
If you have files with extensions that don't match the file type, you could use the file utility.
find $PWD -type f -exec file -N \{\} \; | grep "PDF document" | awk -F: '{print $1}'
Instead of $PWD you can use the directory you want to start the search in. file prints even out he PDF version.