I know there is a nice Linux program called find, which used as
find /home/user -name ".txt"
will print all the files with .txt extension with their relative path
How can I achieve the same using ls, grep and possibly awk?
I tried listing all files in directory and its subdirectories recursively using
ls -LR1
but have no idea how to parse it using grep.
Any advice would be greatly appraciated.
You can do this with bash4 and zsh :
shopt -s globstar # required if not enabled with bash4
printf '%s\n' **/*.txt
But don't trust anyone finding a solution with ls + awk, not the good way to achieve this with robustness
Related
I want to find all the hidden files inside a directory in linux terminal.
I have found out that we have a grep command to search for the file but I need to search for hidden files.
grep -r search *
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
try this on your terminal too show all the hidden files on your system:
find / -name ".*" 2> /dev/null
or you can use other way like in this web https://devconnected.com/how-to-show-hidden-files-on-linux/
Simply use (with GNU grep)
grep -r search .
if you want to search contents of files in the current directory and its subdirectories recursively.
Note: It isn't clear if you want to search filenames or contents of files.
The proper solution:
find /dir -name '.*' -type f
If by "hidden file" you mean Linux file names that begin with . that are often hidden by default, (and directories starting with . whose contents might also be considered "hidden") then try this command:
find . -print | grep '/\.'
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.
So I am trying to write a command line shell script or a shell script that will be able to recursively loop through a directory, all its files, and sub-directories for certain files and then print the location of these files to a text file.
I know that this is possible using BASH commands such as find, locate, exec, and >.
This is what I have so far. find <top-directory> -name '*.class' -exec locate {} > location.txt \;
This does not work though. Can any BASH, Shell scripting experts help me out please?
Thank-you for reading this.
The default behavior of find (if you don't specify any other action) is to print the filename. So you can simply do:
find <top-directory> -name '*.class' > location.txt
Or if you want to be explicit about it:
find <top-directory> -name '*.class' -print > location.txt
You can save the redirection by using find's -fprint option:
find <top-directory> -name '*.class' -fprint location.txt
From the man page:
-fprint file
[...] print the full file name into file file. If file does not exist when find is run, it is created; if it does exist, it is truncated.
A less preferred way to do it is to use ls:
ls -d $PWD**/* | grep class
let's break it down:
ls -d # lists the directory (returns `.`)
ls -d $PWD # lists the directory - but this time $PWD will provide full path
ls -d $PWD/** # list the directory with full-path and every file under this directory (not recursively) - an effect which is due to `/**` part
ls -d $PWD/**/* # same like previous one, only that now do it recursively to the folders below (achieved by adding the `/*` at the end)
A better way of doing it:
After reading this due to recommendation from Charles Duffy, it appears as a bad idea to use both ls as well as find (article also says: "find is just as bad as ls in this context".) The reason it's a bad idea is because you can't control the output of ls: for example, you can't configure ls to terminate filenames with NUL. The reason it's problematic is that unix allows all kind of weird characters in a file-name (newline, pipe etc) and will "break" ls in a way you can't anticipate.
Better use a shell script for the task, and it's pretty simple task too:
Create a file my_script.sh, edit the file to contain:
for i in **/*; do
echo $PWD/$i
done
Give it execute permissions (by running: chmod +x my_script.sh).
Run it from the same directory with:
./my_script.sh
and you're good to go!
I need to traverse a directory so starting in one directory and going deeper into difference sub directories. However I also need to be able to have access to each individual file to modify the file. Is there already a command to do this or will I have to write a script? Could someone provide some code to help me with this task? Thanks.
The find command is just the tool for that. Its -exec flag or -print0 in combination with xargs -0 allows fine-grained control over what to do with each file.
Example: Replace all foo's by bar's in all files in /tmp and subdirectories.
find /tmp -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/' '{}' ';'
for i in `find` ; do
if [ -d $i ] ; then do something with a directory ; fi
if [ -f $i ] ; then do something with a file etc. ; fi
done
This will return the whole tree (recursively) in the current directory in a list that the loop will go through.
This can be easily achieved by mixing find, xargs, sed (or other file modification command).
For example:
$ find /path/to/base/dir -type f -name '*.properties' | xargs sed -ie '/^#/d'
This will filter all files with file extension .properties.
The xargs command will feed the file path generated by find command into the sed command.
The sed command will delete all lines start with # in the files (feed by xargs).
Command combination in this way is very flexible.
For example, find command have different parameters so you can filter by user name, file size, file path (eg: under /test/ subfolder), file modification time.
Another dimension of flexibility is how and what to change in your file. For ex, sed command allows you to make changes on file in applying substitution (specify via regular expressions). Similarly, you can use gzip to compress the file. And so on ...
You would usually use the find command. On Linux, you have the GNU version, of course. It has many extra (and useful) options. Both will allow you to execute a command (eg a shell script) on the files as they are found.
The exact details of how to make changes to the file depend on the change you want to make to the file. That is probably best scripted, with find running the script:
POSIX or GNU:
find . -type f -exec your_script '{}' +
This will run your script once for a group of files with those names provided as arguments. If you want to do it one file at a time, replace the + with ';' (or \;).
I am assuming SearchMe is the example directory name you need to traverse completely.
I am also assuming, since it was not specified, the files you want to modify are all text file. Is this correct?
In such scenario I would suggest using the command:
find SearchMe -type f -exec vi {} \;
If you are not familiar with vi editor, just use another one (nano, emacs, kate, kwrite, gedit, etc.) and it should work as well.
Bash 4+
shopt -s globstar
for file in **
do
if [ -f "$file" ];then
# do some processing to your file here
# where the find command can't do conveniently
fi
done
I need to check several files which are in different locations for a specific information.
So, how to make a script which checks for the argument word through several directories?
The directories are in different locations. For ex.
/home/check1/
/opt/log/
/var/status/
You could also do (next to ´find´)
do a
for DIR in /home/check1 /opt/log /var/status ; do
grep -R searchword $DIR;
done
At the very simplest, it boils down to
find . -name '*.c' | xargs grep word
to find a given word in all the .c files in the current directory and below.
grep -R may also work for you, but it can be a problem if you don't want to search all files.
Use the grep -R (recursive) option and give grep multiple directory arguments.
Try find http://content.hccfl.edu/pollock/Unix/FindCmd.htm using your searchwords and the directories.
The man page of grep should explain what you need. Anyway, if you need to search recursively you can use:
grep -R --include=PATTERN "string_to_search" $directory
You can also use:
--exclude=PATTERN to skip some file
--exclude-dir=PATTERN to skip some directories
The other option is use find to get the files and pipe it to grep to search the strings.