So for example, I have a text document of a list of file names I may have in a directory. I want to grep or use find to find out if those file names exist in a specific directory and the subdirectories within it. Current I can do it manually via find . | grep filename but that's one at a time and when I have over 100 file names I need to check to see if I have them or not that can be really pesky and time-consuming.
What's the best way to go about this?
xargs is what you want here. The case is following:
Assume you have a file named filenames.txt that contains a list of files
a.file
b.file
c.file
d.file
e.file
and only e.file doesn't exist.
the command in terminal is:
cat filenames.txt | xargs -I {} find . -type f -name {}
the output of this command is:
a.file
b.file
c.file
d.file
Maybe this is helpful.
If the files didn't move, since the last time, updatedb ran, often < 24h, your fastest search is by locate.
Read the filelist into an array and search by locate. In case the filenames are common (or occur as a part of other files), grep them by the base dir, where to find them:
< file.lst mapfile filearr
locate ${filearr[#]} | grep /path/where/to/find
If the file names may contain whitespace or characters, which might get interpreted by the bash, the usual masking mechanisms have to been taken.
A friend had helped me figure it out via find . | grep -i -Ff filenames.txt
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.
I need to search a file in unix which starts with "catalina"
find ... what to be used effectively -name, -exec ? Whats the expression
Also I need to show few files at a time, then show some more. There are huge set of log files in there. I know there is some expression, but forgot...
find /path/to/search/in -name 'catalina*'
Use iname to match case-insensitively.
To not be overwhelmed with a long list of files, filter through less (append |less). You can also use more instead of less.
If catalina is the file name, then use
find -name 'catalina*'
If catalina is the first word contained in the file, then use
find -type f | xargs head -v -n 1 | grep -B 1 -A 1 -e '^catalina'
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.