I want to search an expression say "abcd" in all files of a directory but exclude some file of a certain type in my search
like
grep -rn 'abcd' *
But the result should not include expression found in files with extensions .js and .h. How will I do that?
use the --exclude option
grep 'your string here' -r --exclude=\*.{js,h}
So, at this point I typically advise to use ack, which is like grep, but has a lot of built-in features like file type selection.
But with grep, and a bit of shell magic, this can work:
find -not -iname '*.h' -not -iname '*.js' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -rn 'abcd'
Related
I want to grep for a string in all the files which have a particular patter in their name and is case-insensitive.
For eg if I have two files ABC.txt and aBc.txt, then I want something like
grep -i 'test' *ABC*
The above command should look in both the files.
You can use find and then grep on the results of that:
find . -iname "*ABC*" -exec grep -i "test" {} \;
Note that this will run grep once on each file found. If you want to run grep once on all the files (in which case you risk running into the command line length limit), you can use a plus at the end:
find . -iname "*ABC*" -exec grep -i "test" {} \+
You can also use xargs to process a really large number of results more efficiently:
find . -iname "*ABC*" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i test
The -print0 makes find output 0-terminated results, and the -0 makes xargs able to deal with this format, which means you don't need to worry about any special characters in the filenames. However, it is not totally portable, since it's a GNU extension.
If you don't have a find that supports -print0 (for example SVR4), you can still use -exec as above or just
find . -iname "*ABC*" | xargs grep -i test
But you should be sure your filenames don't have newlines in them, otherwise xargs will treat each line of a filename as a new argument.
You should use find to match file and search string that you want with command grep which support regular expression, for your question, you should input command like below:
find . -name "*ABC*" -exec grep \<test\> {} \;
I am running -> "find . -name '*.txt'" command and getting list of files.
I am getting below mention output:
./bsd/contrib/amd/ldap-id.txt
./bsd/contrib/expat/tests/benchmark/README.txt
./bsd/contrib/expat/tests/README.txt
./bsd/lib/libc/softfloat/README.txt
and so on,
Out of these files how can i run grep command and read contents and filter only those files which have certain keyword? for e.g. "version" in it.
xargs is a great way to accomplish this, and its already been covered.
The -exec option of find is also useful for this. It will perform a command over all files returned from find.
To invoke grep as few times as possible, passing multiple filenames to each call:
find . -name '*.txt' -exec grep -H 'foo' {} +
Alternately, to invoke grep exactly once for each file found:
find . -name '*.txt' -exec grep -H 'foo' {} ';'
In either case, {} is like a placeholder for the values from find; if your shell is zsh, it may be necessary to escape it, as in '{}'.
There are several ways to accomplish this.
If there are non-.txt files which might usefully contain the keyword:
grep -r KEYWORD *
This uses the recursive directory search option of grep.
To search only .txt files:
find . -name '*.txt' -exec grep KEYWORD {} \;
or
find . -name '*.txt' -exec grep KEYWORD {} +
or
find . -execdir grep KEYWORD {}
The first runs grep for each matching file. The second runs grep much fewer times, accumulating many matched files before invoking grep. The third form runsgrep` once in every directory.
There is usually a function built into find for that, but to be portable across platforms, I typically use xargs. Say you want to find all the xml files in or below the current directly and get a list of each occurrence of 'foo', you can do this:
find ./ -type f -name '*.xml' -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 grep -H foo
It should be self-explanatory except for the -print0, which separates filenames with NULs rather than newlines, and the -0, which tells xargs to use those NULs rather than interpreting spaces and quotes as syntax (which can confuse it if filenames contain either).
I have a case where multiple .bz2 files are situated in subdirectories. And I want to search for a text, from all files, using bzcat and grep command linux commands.
I am able to search one-one file by using the following command:
bzcat <filename.bz2> | grep -ia 'text string' | less
But I now I need to do the above for all files in subdirectories.
You can use bzgrep instead of bzcat and grep. This is faster.
To grep recursively in a directory tree use find:
find -type f -name '*.bz2' -execdir bzgrep "pattern" {} \;
find is searching recursively for all files with the *.bz2 extension and applies the command specified with -execdir to them.
There are several methods:
bzgrep regexp $(find -name \*.bz2)
This method will work if number of the found files is not very big (and they have no special characters in the pathes). Otherwise you better use this one:
find -name \*.bz2 -exec bzgrep regexp {} /dev/null \;
Please note /dev/null in the second method. You use it to make bzgrep print the filename,
where the regexp was found.
Just try to use:
bzgrep --help
grep through bzip2 files
Usage: bzgrep [grep_options] pattern [files]
For example, I need grep information from list of files by number 1941974:
'billing_log_1.bz'
'billing_log_2.bz'
'billing_log_3.bz'
'billing_log_4.bz'
'billing_log_5.bz'
What can I do?
bzgrep '1941974' billing_log_1
Continuous your code with fixes by bzcat:
find . -type f -name "*.bz2" |while read file
do
bzcat $file | grep -ia 'text string' | less
done
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.
i have to search for a particular text in files and for that im using grep command but it searches only in current folder.What i want is that using a single grep command i can search a particular thing in the current folder as well as in all of its sub folders.How can i do that???
POSIX grep does not support recursive searching - the GNU version of grep does.
find . -type f -exec grep 'pattern' {} \;
would be runnable on any POSIX compliant UNIX.
man grep says
-R, -r, --recursive
Read all files under each directory, recursively; this is
equivalent to the -d recurse option.
And even more common is to use find with xargs, say
find <dir> -type f -name <shellglob> -print0 | xargs grep -0
where -print0 and -0, respectively, would use null char to separate entries in order to avoid issues with filenames having space characters.