Im trying to look for a word like "numbers" in multiple files not just txt files using terminal. I have tried strings -r /media/E016-5484/* | grep numbers But it still doesn't work !
let say you are looking for 1234 in all files which in name contain file_pattern
grep 1234 ` find . -name "*file_pattern*"`
or
find . -name "*file_pattern*" -exec grep 1234 {} \;
If I am not mistaken, you are looking for
grep numbers -r /media/E016-5484
From the manpage:
-r, --recursive
Read all files under each directory, recursively, following symbolic links only if they are on the command line. This is equivalent to the -d recurse option.
Related
I have 9000+ XML files in a folder. I'm searching for those that contains a certain word then copy them to a certain location. I'm using the terminal:-
grep -r "the word I'm searching"
It's working but I'm looking for a better and faster way if anybody has an idea.
Easy and efficient way:
find . -name '*.xml' | xargs grep -l 'You search string' \
| xargs mv -t your_target_directory
You can do it in a single line using the following code
mv `ls | grep 'the word you are searching for' -rl` directoryname/
This works only if your directory contains only xml file.
There is a directory which contains 100 text files. I used grep to search a given text in the directory as follow:
cat *.txt | grep Ya_Mahdi
and grep shows Ya_Mahdi.
I need to know which file holds the text. Is it possible?
Just get rid of cat and provide the list of files to grep:
grep Ya_Mahdi *.txt
While this would generally work, depending on the number of .txt files in that folder, the argument list for grep might get too large.
You can use find for a bullet proof solution:
find --maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' -exec grep -H Ya_Mahdi {} +
I want to search a word suppose "abcd" in all the files(Including hidden and all possible files) in dir suppose /home/john/?
This is what I tried, I am running the below command and its getting stuck for more than 24 hours.
command --> find /home/john -type f -exec grep -iH 'abcd' {} \;
Result something which will show all the files which have this particular word or any file which is have the name as our search word.
Thanks
What about using grep recursion option ?
grep -r abcd /home/john
I've seen numerous examples for replacing one string with another among multiple files but what I want to do is a bit different. Probably a lot simpler :)
Find all the files that match a certain string and replace them completely with the contents of a new file.
I have a find command that works
find /home/*/public_html -name "index.php" -exec grep "version:1.23" '{}' \; -print
This finds all the files I need to update.
Now how do I replace their entire content with the CONTENTS of /home/indexnew.txt (I could also name it /home/index.php)
I emphasize content because I don't want to change the name or ownership of the files I'm updating.
find ... | while read filename; do cat static_file > "$filename"; done
efficiency hint: use grep -q -- it will return "true" immediately when the first match is found, not having to read the entire file.
If you have a bunch of files you want to replace, and you can get all of their names using wildcards you can try piping output to the tee command:
cat my_file | tee /home/*/update.txt
This should look through all the directories in /home and write the text in my_file to update.txt in each of those directories.
Let me know if this helps or isn't what you want.
I am not sure if your command without -l and then print it is better than to add -l in grep to list file directly.
find /home/*/public_html -name "index.php" -exec grep -l "version:1.23" '{}' \; |xargs -i cp /home/index.php {}
Here is the option -l detail
-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 will stop on the first match. (-l is specified by
POSIX.)
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.