Im trying to look for the text Elapsed time inside a specific log file names vsim.log. Im not familiar with grep, but after some googling I found that grep -r will allow me to do recursively searches and grep -r "Elapsed time" will do recursive searches for that phrase within all files in my directory. According to this link, I can then do grep -r "Elapsed time" ./vsim* to recursively search through the directories for files starting with vsim and look inside those files for Elapsed time. However, when i tried this i get grep: No match. which i know is not true since I know the files exist there with those keywords. What am i messing up?
Continuing from my comment, you can use find to locate the file vsim.log if you do not know its exact location and then use the -execdir option to find to grep the file for the term Elapsed time, e.g.
find path -type f -name "vsim.log" -execdir grep -H 'Elapsed time' '{}' +
That will return the filename along with the matched text which you can simply parse to isolate the filename if desired. You can process all files that match if you anticipate more than one by feeding the results of the find command into a while read -r loop, e.g.
while read -r match; do
# process "$match" as desired
echo "Term 'Elapsed time' found in file ${match%:*}"
done < <(find path -type f -name "vsim.log" -execdir grep -H 'Elapsed time' '{}' +)
Where:
find is the swiss-army knife for finding files on your system
path can be any relative or absolute path to search (e.g. $HOME or /home/dorojevets) to search all files in your home directory
the option -type f tells find to only locate files (see man find for link handling)
the option -name "foo" tell find to only locate files named foo (wildcards allowed)
the -exec and -execdir options allow you to execute the command that follows on each file (represented by '{}')
the grep -H 'Elapsed time' '{}' being the command to execute on each filename
the + being what tells find it has reached the end of the command (\; used with -exec)
finally, the ${match%:*} parameter expansion on the variable $match is used to parse the filename from filename:Elapsed time returned by grep -H (the %:* simply being used to trim everything to the first : from the right of $match)
Give that a try and compare the execution time to a recursive grep of the file tree. What you may be missing in this discussion, is that you use find if you know some part of the filename (or file mod time, or set of permissions, etc) that contains the information you need. It can search millions of files in a file tree vastly quicker than you can recursively grep every single file. If you have no clue what file may contain the needed info -- then use grep and just wait...
Try:
grep -r "Elapsed time" * --include vsim.log
Or this answer Use grep --exclude/--include syntax to not grep through certain files.
The following works just in case if you are using Mac:
To search UUID in *.c files recursively under given folder "/home" use the following:
grep -r "UUID" --include "*.c" /home/
To recursively search UUID in all main.c files in multiple projects under current folder use the following:
grep -r "UUID" --include "main.c" .
Related
i recently started learning linux because a ctf contest is coming in the next months. The problem that I struggle with is that i am trying to make a bash script that starts from a directory, checks if the content is a directory or other kind of file. If it is a file,image etc apply strings $f | grep -i 'abcdef', if it is a directory cd to that directory and start over. i have c++ experience and i understand the logic but i can't really make it work.I can't succesfully implement the loop that goes thru all the subdirectories. All help would be appreciated!
you don not need a loop for this implementation. The find command can do what you are looking after.
for instance:
find /home -type f -exec sh -c " strings {} | grep abcd " \;
explain:
/home is you base directory can be anything
-type f: means a regular file
-exec from the man page:
"Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All
following arguments to find are taken to be arguments to
the command until an argument consisting of ;' is encountered. The string {}' is replaced by the current
file name being processed everywhere it occurs in the
arguments to the command, not just in arguments where it
is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of these
constructions might need to be escaped (with a `') or
quoted to protect them from expansion by the shell. See
the EXAMPLES section for examples of the use of the -exec
option. The specified command is run once for each
matched file. The command is executed in the starting
directory. There are unavoidable security problems
surrounding use of the -exec action; you should use the
-execdir option instead."
If you want to just find the string in a file and you do not HAVE TO first find a directory and then a file and then search, you can just simply find the text with grep.
Go to the the parent directory and execute :
grep -iR "abcd"
Or from any place,
grep -iR "abcd" /var/log/mylogs/
Suggesting a grep command on find filter results:
grep "abcd" $(find . -type f)
I would like to go through all the files in the current directory (or sub-directories) and echoes me back the name of files only if they contain certain words.
More detail:
find -type f -name "*hello *" will give me all file names that have "hello" in their names. But instead of that, I want to search through the files and if that file's content contains "hello" then prints out the name of the file.
Is there a way to approach this?
You can use GNU find and GNU grep as
find /path -type f -exec grep -Hi 'hello' {} +
This is efficient in a way that it doesn't invoke as many grep instances to as many files returned from find. This works in an underlying assumption that find returns a set of files for grep to search on. If you are unsure if the files may not be available, as a fool-proof way, you can use xargs with -r flag, in which case the commands following xargs are executed only if the piped commands return any results
find /path -type f | xargs -r0 grep -Hi 'hello'
I'm new to Linux terminal; using Ubuntu Peppermint 5.
I want to recursively search all directories for a given text string (eg 'mystring'), in all files which have a given file extension (eg. '*.doc') in the file name; and then display a list of the file names and absolute file paths of all matches. I don't need to see any lines of content.
This must be a common problem. I'm hoping to find a solution which does the search quickly and efficiently, and is also simple to remember and type into the terminal.
I've tried using 'cat', 'grep', 'find', and 'locate' with various options, and piped together in different combinations, but I haven't found a way to do the above.
Something similar was discussed on:
How to show grep result with complete path or file name
and:
Recursively search for files of a given name, and find instances of a particular phrase AND display the path to that file
but I can't figure a way to adapt these to do the above, and would be grateful for any suggestions.
According to the grep manual, you can do this using the --include option (combined with the -l option if you want only the name — I usually use -n to show line numbers):
--include=glob
Search only files whose name matches glob, using wildcard matching as described under --exclude.
-l
--files-with-matches
Suppress normal output; instead print the name of each input file from which output would normally have been printed. The scanning of each file stops on the first match. (-l is specified by POSIX.)
A suitable glob would be "*.doc" (ensure that it is quoted, to allow the shell to pass it to grep).
GNU grep also has a recursive option -r (not in POSIX grep). Together with the globbing, you can search a directory-tree of ".doc" files like this:
grep -r -l --include="*.doc" "mystring" .
If you wanted to make this portable, then find is the place to start. But using grep's extension makes searches much faster, and is available on any Linux platform.
find . -name '*.doc' -exec grep -l 'mystring' {} \; -print
How it works:
find searches recursively from the given path .
for all files which name is '*.doc'
-exec grep execute grep on files found
suppress output from grep -l
and search inside the files for 'mystring'
The expression for grep ends with the {} \;
and -print print out all names where grep founds mystring.
EDIT:
To get only results from the current directory without recursion you can add:
-maxdepth 0 to find.
Given a directory i'm looking for a bash one-liner to get a recursive list of all files with their size and modified time tab separated for easy parsing. Something like:
cows/betsy 145700 2011-03-02 08:27
horses/silver 109895 2011-06-04 17:43
You can use stat(1) to get the information you want, if you don't want the full ls -l output, and you can use find(1) to get a recursive directory listing. Combining them into one line, you could do this:
# Find all regular files under the current directory and print out their
# filenames, sizes, and last modified times
find . -type f -exec stat -f '%N %z %Sm' '{}' +
If you want to make the output more parseable, you can use %m instead of %Sm to get the last modified time as a time_t instead of as a human-readable date.
find is perfect for recursively searching through directories. The -ls action tells it to output its results in ls -l format:
find /dir/ -ls
On Linux machines you can print customized output using the -printf action:
find /dir/ -printf '%p\t%s\t%t\n'
See man find for full details on the format specifiers available with -printf. (This is not POSIX-compatible and may not be available on other UNIX flavors.)
find * -type f -printf '%p\t%s\t%TY-%Tm-%Td %Tk:%TM\n'
If you prefer fixed-width fields rather than tabs, you can do things like changing %s to %10s.
I used find * ... to avoid the leading "./" on each file name. If you don't mind that, use . rather than * (which also shows files whose names start with .). You can also pipe the output through sed 's/^\.\///'.
Note that the output order will be arbitrary. Pipe through sort if you want an ordered listing.
You could try this for recursive listing from current folder called "/from_dir"
find /from_dir/* -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c “%n|%A|%a|%U|%G” > permissions_list.txt
Lists files and directories passes through to stat command and puts all the info into a file called permissions_list.txt
“%n|%A|%a|%U|%G” will give you the following result in the file:
from_
dir|drwxr-sr-x|2755|root|root
from_dir/filename|-rw-r–r–|644|root|root
Cheers!
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.