How to copy the top 10 most recent files from one directory to another? - linux

Al my html files reside here :
/home/thinkcode/myfiles/html/
I want to move the newest 10 files to /home/thinkcode/Test
I have this so far. Please correct me. I am looking for a one-liner!
ls -lt *.htm | head -10 | awk '{print "cp "$1" "..\Test\$1}' | sh

ls -lt *.htm | head -10 | awk '{print "cp " $9 " ../Test/"$9}' | sh

cp seems to understand back-ticked commands. So you could use a command like this one to copy the 10 latest files to another folder like e.g. /test:
cp `ls -t *.htm | head -10` /test

Here is a version which doesn't use ls. It should be less vulnerable to strange characters in file names:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.html' -print0
\| xargs -0 stat --printf "%Y\t%n\n"
\| sort -n
\| tail -n 10
\| cut -f 2
\| xargs cp -t ../Test/
I used find for a couple of reasons:
1) if there are too many files in a directory, bash will balk at the wildcard expansion*.
2) Using the -print0 argument to find gets around the problem of bash expanding whitespace in a filename in to multiple tokens.
* Actually, bash shares a memory buffer for its wildcard expansion and its environment variables, so it's not strictly a function of the number of file names, but rather the total length of the file names and environment variables. Too many environment variables => no wildcard expansion.
EDIT: Incorporated some of #glennjackman's improvements. Kept the initial use of find to avoid the use of the wildcard expansion which might fail in a large directory.

ls -lt *.html | head -10 | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs -i cp {} DestDir
In the above example DestDir is the destination directory for the copy.
Add -t after xargs to see the commands as they execute. I.e., xargs -i -t cp {} DestDir.
For more information check out the xargs command.
EDIT: As pointed out by #DennisWilliamson (and also checking the current man page) re the -i option This option is deprecated; use -I instead..
Also, both solutions presented depend on the filenames in questions don't contain any blanks or tabs.

Related

Bash script to recursively find and replace in files [duplicate]

How do I find and replace every occurrence of:
subdomainA.example.com
with
subdomainB.example.com
in every text file under the /home/www/ directory tree recursively?
find /home/www \( -type d -name .git -prune \) -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
-print0 tells find to print each of the results separated by a null character, rather than a new line. In the unlikely event that your directory has files with newlines in the names, this still lets xargs work on the correct filenames.
\( -type d -name .git -prune \) is an expression which completely skips over all directories named .git. You could easily expand it, if you use SVN or have other folders you want to preserve -- just match against more names. It's roughly equivalent to -not -path .git, but more efficient, because rather than checking every file in the directory, it skips it entirely. The -o after it is required because of how -prune actually works.
For more information, see man find.
The simplest way for me is
grep -rl oldtext . | xargs sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'
Note: Do not run this command on a folder including a git repo - changes to .git could corrupt your git index.
find /home/www/ -type f -exec \
sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
Compared to other answers here, this is simpler than most and uses sed instead of perl, which is what the original question asked for.
All the tricks are almost the same, but I like this one:
find <mydir> -type f -exec sed -i 's/<string1>/<string2>/g' {} +
find <mydir>: look up in the directory.
-type f:
File is of type: regular file
-exec command {} +:
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending
each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of
matched files. The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of
`{}' is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the starting directory.
For me the easiest solution to remember is https://stackoverflow.com/a/2113224/565525, i.e.:
sed -i '' -e 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' $(find /home/www/ -type f)
NOTE: -i '' solves OSX problem sed: 1: "...": invalid command code .
NOTE: If there are too many files to process you'll get Argument list too long. The workaround - use find -exec or xargs solution described above.
cd /home/www && find . -type f -print0 |
xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
For anyone using silver searcher (ag)
ag SearchString -l0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/SearchString/Replacement/g'
Since ag ignores git/hg/svn file/folders by default, this is safe to run inside a repository.
This one is compatible with git repositories, and a bit simpler:
Linux:
git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i 's/original_text/new_text/g'
Mac:
git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/original_text/new_text/g'
(Thanks to http://blog.jasonmeridth.com/posts/use-git-grep-to-replace-strings-in-files-in-your-git-repository/)
To cut down on files to recursively sed through, you could grep for your string instance:
grep -rl <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g
If you run man grep you'll notice you can also define an --exlude-dir="*.git" flag if you want to omit searching through .git directories, avoiding git index issues as others have politely pointed out.
Leading you to:
grep -rl --exclude-dir="*.git" <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g
A straight forward method if you need to exclude directories (--exclude-dir=..folder) and also might have file names with spaces (solved by using 0Byte for both grep -Z and xargs -0)
grep -rlZ oldtext . --exclude-dir=.folder | xargs -0 sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'
An one nice oneliner as an extra. Using git grep.
git grep -lz 'subdomainA.example.com' | xargs -0 perl -i'' -pE "s/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g"
Simplest way to replace (all files, directory, recursive)
find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
Note: Sometimes you might need to ignore some hidden files i.e. .git, you can use above command.
If you want to include hidden files use,
find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
In both case the string foo will be replaced with new string bar
find /home/www/ -type f -exec perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
find /home/www/ -type f will list all files in /home/www/ (and its subdirectories).
The "-exec" flag tells find to run the following command on each file found.
perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
is the command run on the files (many at a time). The {} gets replaced by file names.
The + at the end of the command tells find to build one command for many filenames.
Per the find man page:
"The command line is built in much the same way that
xargs builds its command lines."
Thus it's possible to achieve your goal (and handle filenames containing spaces) without using xargs -0, or -print0.
I just needed this and was not happy with the speed of the available examples. So I came up with my own:
cd /var/www && ack-grep -l --print0 subdomainA.example.com | xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
Ack-grep is very efficient on finding relevant files. This command replaced ~145 000 files with a breeze whereas others took so long I couldn't wait until they finish.
or use the blazing fast GNU Parallel:
grep -rl oldtext . | parallel sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g' {}
grep -lr 'subdomainA.example.com' | while read file; do sed -i "s/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g" "$file"; done
I guess most people don't know that they can pipe something into a "while read file" and it avoids those nasty -print0 args, while presevering spaces in filenames.
Further adding an echo before the sed allows you to see what files will change before actually doing it.
Try this:
sed -i 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' `grep -ril 'subdomainA' *`
According to this blog post:
find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/oldtext/newtext/g;'
#!/usr/local/bin/bash -x
find * /home/www -type f | while read files
do
sedtest=$(sed -n '/^/,/$/p' "${files}" | sed -n '/subdomainA/p')
if [ "${sedtest}" ]
then
sed s'/subdomainA/subdomainB/'g "${files}" > "${files}".tmp
mv "${files}".tmp "${files}"
fi
done
If you do not mind using vim together with grep or find tools, you could follow up the answer given by user Gert in this link --> How to do a text replacement in a big folder hierarchy?.
Here's the deal:
recursively grep for the string that you want to replace in a certain path, and take only the complete path of the matching file. (that would be the $(grep 'string' 'pathname' -Rl).
(optional) if you want to make a pre-backup of those files on centralized directory maybe you can use this also: cp -iv $(grep 'string' 'pathname' -Rl) 'centralized-directory-pathname'
after that you can edit/replace at will in vim following a scheme similar to the one provided on the link given:
:bufdo %s#string#replacement#gc | update
You can use awk to solve this as below,
for file in `find /home/www -type f`
do
awk '{gsub(/subdomainA.example.com/,"subdomainB.example.com"); print $0;}' $file > ./tempFile && mv ./tempFile $file;
done
hope this will help you !!!
For replace all occurrences in a git repository you can use:
git ls-files -z | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
See List files in local git repo? for other options to list all files in a repository. The -z options tells git to separate the file names with a zero byte, which assures that xargs (with the option -0) can separate filenames, even if they contain spaces or whatnot.
A bit old school but this worked on OS X.
There are few trickeries:
• Will only edit files with extension .sls under the current directory
• . must be escaped to ensure sed does not evaluate them as "any character"
• , is used as the sed delimiter instead of the usual /
Also note this is to edit a Jinja template to pass a variable in the path of an import (but this is off topic).
First, verify your sed command does what you want (this will only print the changes to stdout, it will not change the files):
for file in $(find . -name *.sls -type f); do echo -e "\n$file: "; sed 's,foo\.bar,foo/bar/\"+baz+\"/,g' $file; done
Edit the sed command as needed, once you are ready to make changes:
for file in $(find . -name *.sls -type f); do echo -e "\n$file: "; sed -i '' 's,foo\.bar,foo/bar/\"+baz+\"/,g' $file; done
Note the -i '' in the sed command, I did not want to create a backup of the original files (as explained in In-place edits with sed on OS X or in Robert Lujo's comment in this page).
Happy seding folks!
just to avoid to change also
NearlysubdomainA.example.com
subdomainA.example.comp.other
but still
subdomainA.example.com.IsIt.good
(maybe not good in the idea behind domain root)
find /home/www/ -type f -exec sed -i 's/\bsubdomainA\.example\.com\b/\1subdomainB.example.com\2/g' {} \;
Here's a version that should be more general than most; it doesn't require find (using du instead), for instance. It does require xargs, which are only found in some versions of Plan 9 (like 9front).
du -a | awk -F' ' '{ print $2 }' | xargs sed -i -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
If you want to add filters like file extensions use grep:
du -a | grep "\.scala$" | awk -F' ' '{ print $2 }' | xargs sed -i -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
For Qshell (qsh) on IBMi, not bash as tagged by OP.
Limitations of qsh commands:
find does not have the -print0 option
xargs does not have -0 option
sed does not have -i option
Thus the solution in qsh:
PATH='your/path/here'
SEARCH=\'subdomainA.example.com\'
REPLACE=\'subdomainB.example.com\'
for file in $( find ${PATH} -P -type f ); do
TEMP_FILE=${file}.${RANDOM}.temp_file
if [ ! -e ${TEMP_FILE} ]; then
touch -C 819 ${TEMP_FILE}
sed -e 's/'$SEARCH'/'$REPLACE'/g' \
< ${file} > ${TEMP_FILE}
mv ${TEMP_FILE} ${file}
fi
done
Caveats:
Solution excludes error handling
Not Bash as tagged by OP
If you wanted to use this without completely destroying your SVN repository, you can tell 'find' to ignore all hidden files by doing:
find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
Using combination of grep and sed
for pp in $(grep -Rl looking_for_string)
do
sed -i 's/looking_for_string/something_other/g' "${pp}"
done
perl -p -i -e 's/oldthing/new_thingy/g' `grep -ril oldthing *`
to change multiple files (and saving a backup as *.bak):
perl -p -i -e "s/\|/x/g" *
will take all files in directory and replace | with x
called a “Perl pie” (easy as a pie)

Delete files with string found in file - Linux cli

I am trying to delete erroneous emails based on finding the email address in the file via Linux CLI.
I can get the files with
find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com
But I cannot figure out how to delete them from there as the following code doesn't work.
rm -f | xargs find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com
Solution for your command:
grep -l email#example.com * | xargs rm
Or
for file in $(grep -l email#example.com *); do
rm -i $file;
# ^ prompt for delete
done
For safety I normally pipe the output from find to something like awk and create a batch file with each line being "rm filename"
That way you can check it before actually running it and manually fix any odd edge cases that are difficult to do with a regex
find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com | awk '{print "rm "$1}' > doit.sh
vi doit.sh // check for murphy and his law
source doit.sh
You can use find's -exec and -delete, it will only delete the file if the grep command succeeds. Using grep -q so it wouldn't print anything, you can replace the -q with -l to see which files had the string in them.
find . -exec grep -q 'email#example.com' '{}' \; -delete
I liked Martin Beckett's solution but found that file names with spaces could trip it up (like who uses spaces in file names, pfft :D). Also I wanted to review what was matched so I move the matched files to a local folder instead of just deleting them with the 'rm' command:
# Make a folder in the current directory to put the matched files
$ mkdir -p './matched-files'
# Create a script to move files that match the grep
# NOTE: Remove "-name '*.txt'" to allow all file extensions to be searched.
# NOTE: Edit the grep argument 'something' to what you want to search for.
$ find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -al 'something' | awk -F '\n' '{ print "mv \""$0"\" ./matched-files" }' > doit.sh
Or because its possible (in Linux, idk about other OS's) to have newlines in a file name you can use this longer, untested if works better (who puts newlines in filenames? pfft :D), version:
$ find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -alZ 'something' | awk -F '\0' '{ for (x=1; x<NF; x++) print "mv \""$x"\" ./matched-files" }' > doit.sh
# Evaluate the file following the 'source' command as a list of commands executed in the current context:
$ source doit.sh
NOTE: I had issues where grep could not match inside files that had utf-16 encoding.
See here for a workaround. In case that website disappears what you do is use grep's -a flag which makes grep treat files as text and use a regex pattern that matches any first-byte in each extended character. For example to match Entité do this:
grep -a 'Entit.e'
and if that doesn't work then try this:
grep -a 'E.n.t.i.t.e'
Despite Martin's safe answer, if you've got certainty of what you want to delete, such as in writing a script, I've used this with greater success than any other one-liner suggested before around here:
$ find . | grep -l email#example.com | xargs -I {} rm -rf {}
But I rather find by name:
$ find . -iname *something* | xargs -I {} echo {}
rm -f `find . | xargs grep -li email#example.com`
does the job better. Use `...` to run the command to offer the file names containing email.#example.com (grep -l lists them, -i ignores case) to remove them with rm (-f forcibly / -i interactively).
find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com
how to remove:
rm -f 'find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com'
Quick and efficent. Replace find_files_having_this_text with the text you want to search.
grep -Ril 'find_files_having_this_text' . | xargs rm

Copy the three newest files under one directory (recursively) to another specified directory

I'm using bash.
Suppose I have a log file directory /var/myprogram/logs/.
Under this directory I have many sub-directories and sub-sub-directories that include different types of log files from my program.
I'd like to find the three newest files (modified most recently), whose name starts with 2010, under /var/myprogram/logs/, regardless of sub-directory and copy them to my home directory.
Here's what I would do manually
1. Go through each directory and do ls -lt 2010*
to see which files starting with 2010 are modified most recently.
2. Once I go through all directories, I'd know which three files are the newest. So I copy them manually to my home directory.
This is pretty tedious, so I wondered if maybe I could somehow pipe some commands together to do this in one step, preferably without using shell scripts?
I've been looking into find, ls, head, and awk that I might be able to use but haven't figured the right way to glue them together.
Let me know if I need to clarify. Thanks.
Here's how you can do it:
find -type f -name '2010*' -printf "%C#\t%P\n" |sort -r -k1,1 |head -3 |cut -f 2-
This outputs a list of files prefixed by their last change time, sorts them based on that value, takes the top 3 and removes the timestamp.
Your answers feel very complicated, how about
for FILE in find . -type d; do ls -t -1 -F $FILE | grep -v "/" | head -n3 | xargs -I{} mv {} ..; done;
or laid out nicely
for FILE in `find . -type d`;
do
ls -t -1 -F $FILE | grep -v "/" | grep "^2010" | head -n3 | xargs -I{} mv {} ~;
done;
My "shortest" answer after quickly hacking it up.
for file in $(find . -iname *.php -mtime 1 | xargs ls -l | awk '{ print $6" "$7" "$8" "$9 }' | sort | sed -n '1,3p' | awk '{ print $4 }'); do cp $file ../; done
The main command stored in $() does the following:
Find all files recursively in current directory matching (case insensitive) the name *.php and having been modified in the last 24 hours.
Pipe to ls -l, required to be able to sort by modification date, so we can have the first three
Extract the modification date and file name/path with awk
Sort these files based on datetime
With sed print only the first 3 files
With awk print only their name/path
Used in a for loop and as action copy them to the desired location.
Or use #Hasturkun's variant, which popped as a response while I was editing this post :)

How do I recursively grep all directories and subdirectories?

How do I recursively grep all directories and subdirectories?
find . | xargs grep "texthere" *
grep -r "texthere" .
The first parameter represents the regular expression to search for, while the second one represents the directory that should be searched. In this case, . means the current directory.
Note: This works for GNU grep, and on some platforms like Solaris you must specifically use GNU grep as opposed to legacy implementation. For Solaris this is the ggrep command.
If you know the extension or pattern of the file you would like, another method is to use --include option:
grep -r --include "*.txt" texthere .
You can also mention files to exclude with --exclude.
Ag
If you frequently search through code, Ag (The Silver Searcher) is a much faster alternative to grep, that's customized for searching code. For instance, it's recursive by default and automatically ignores files and directories listed in .gitignore, so you don't have to keep passing the same cumbersome exclude options to grep or find.
I now always use (even on Windows with GoW -- Gnu on Windows):
grep --include="*.xxx" -nRHI "my Text to grep" *
(As noted by kronen in the comments, you can add 2>/dev/null to void permission denied outputs)
That includes the following options:
--include=PATTERN
Recurse in directories only searching file matching PATTERN.
-n, --line-number
Prefix each line of output with the line number within its input file.
(Note: phuclv adds in the comments that -n decreases performance a lot so, so you might want to skip that option)
-R, -r, --recursive
Read all files under each directory, recursively; this is equivalent to the -d recurse option.
-H, --with-filename
Print the filename for each match.
-I
Process a binary file as if it did not contain matching data;
this is equivalent to the --binary-files=without-match option.
And I can add 'i' (-nRHIi), if I want case-insensitive results.
I can get:
/home/vonc/gitpoc/passenger/gitlist/github #grep --include="*.php" -nRHI "hidden" *
src/GitList/Application.php:43: 'git.hidden' => $config->get('git', 'hidden') ? $config->get('git', 'hidden') : array(),
src/GitList/Provider/GitServiceProvider.php:21: $options['hidden'] = $app['git.hidden'];
tests/InterfaceTest.php:32: $options['hidden'] = array(self::$tmpdir . '/hiddenrepo');
vendor/klaussilveira/gitter/lib/Gitter/Client.php:20: protected $hidden;
vendor/klaussilveira/gitter/lib/Gitter/Client.php:170: * Get hidden repository list
vendor/klaussilveira/gitter/lib/Gitter/Client.php:176: return $this->hidden;
...
Also:
find ./ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "foo"
but grep -r is a better answer.
globbing **
Using grep -r works, but it may overkill, especially in large folders.
For more practical usage, here is the syntax which uses globbing syntax (**):
grep "texthere" **/*.txt
which greps only specific files with pattern selected pattern. It works for supported shells such as Bash +4 or zsh.
To activate this feature, run: shopt -s globstar.
See also: How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?
git grep
For projects under Git version control, use:
git grep "pattern"
which is much quicker.
ripgrep
For larger projects, the quickest grepping tool is ripgrep which greps files recursively by default:
rg "pattern" .
It's built on top of Rust's regex engine which uses finite automata, SIMD and aggressive literal optimizations to make searching very fast. Check the detailed analysis here.
In POSIX systems, you don't find -r parameter for grep and your grep -rn "stuff" . won't run, but if you use find command it will:
find . -type f -exec grep -n "stuff" {} \; -print
Agreed by Solaris and HP-UX.
If you only want to follow actual directories, and not symbolic links,
grep -r "thingToBeFound" directory
If you want to follow symbolic links as well as actual directories (be careful of infinite recursion),
grep -R "thing to be found" directory
Since you're trying to grep recursively, the following options may also be useful to you:
-H: outputs the filename with the line
-n: outputs the line number in the file
So if you want to find all files containing Darth Vader in the current directory or any subdirectories and capture the filename and line number, but do not want the recursion to follow symbolic links, the command would be
grep -rnH "Darth Vader" .
If you want to find all mentions of the word cat in the directory
/home/adam/Desktop/TomAndJerry
and you're currently in the directory
/home/adam/Desktop/WorldDominationPlot
and you want to capture the filename but not the line number of any instance of the string "cats", and you want the recursion to follow symbolic links if it finds them, you could run either of the following
grep -RH "cats" ../TomAndJerry #relative directory
grep -RH "cats" /home/adam/Desktop/TomAndJerry #absolute directory
Source:
running "grep --help"
A short introduction to symbolic links, for anyone reading this answer and confused by my reference to them:
https://www.nixtutor.com/freebsd/understanding-symbolic-links/
To find name of files with path recursively containing the particular string use below command
for UNIX:
find . | xargs grep "searched-string"
for Linux:
grep -r "searched-string" .
find a file on UNIX server
find . -type f -name file_name
find a file on LINUX server
find . -name file_name
just the filenames can be useful too
grep -r -l "foo" .
another syntax to grep a string in all files on a Linux system recursively
grep -irn "string"
the -r indicates a recursive search that searches for the specified string in the given directory and sub directory looking for the specified string in files, program, etc
-i ingnore case sensitive can be used to add inverted case string
-n prints the line number of the specified string
NB: this prints massive result to the console so you might need to filter the output by piping and remove less interesting bits of info it also searches binary programs so you might want to filter some of the results
ag is my favorite way to do this now github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher . It's basically the same thing as ack but with a few more optimizations.
Here's a short benchmark. I clear the cache before each test (cf https://askubuntu.com/questions/155768/how-do-i-clean-or-disable-the-memory-cache )
ryan#3G08$ sync && echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
3
ryan#3G08$ time grep -r "hey ya" .
real 0m9.458s
user 0m0.368s
sys 0m3.788s
ryan#3G08:$ sync && echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
3
ryan#3G08$ time ack-grep "hey ya" .
real 0m6.296s
user 0m0.716s
sys 0m1.056s
ryan#3G08$ sync && echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
3
ryan#3G08$ time ag "hey ya" .
real 0m5.641s
user 0m0.356s
sys 0m3.444s
ryan#3G08$ time ag "hey ya" . #test without first clearing cache
real 0m0.154s
user 0m0.224s
sys 0m0.172s
This should work:
grep -R "texthere" *
If you are looking for a specific content in all files from a directory structure, you may use find since it is more clear what you are doing:
find -type f -exec grep -l "texthere" {} +
Note that -l (downcase of L) shows the name of the file that contains the text. Remove it if you instead want to print the match itself. Or use -H to get the file together with the match. All together, other alternatives are:
find -type f -exec grep -Hn "texthere" {} +
Where -n prints the line number.
This is the one that worked for my case on my current machine (git bash on windows 7):
find ./ -type f -iname "*.cs" -print0 | xargs -0 grep "content pattern"
I always forget the -print0 and -0 for paths with spaces.
EDIT: My preferred tool is now instead ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/releases . It's really fast and has better defaults (like recursive by default). Same example as my original answer but using ripgrep: rg -g "*.cs" "content pattern"
grep -r "texthere" . (notice period at the end)
(^credit: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1987928/1438029)
Clarification:
grep -r "texthere" / (recursively grep all directories and subdirectories)
grep -r "texthere" . (recursively grep these directories and subdirectories)
grep recursive
grep [options] PATTERN [FILE...]
[options]
-R, -r, --recursive
Read all files under each directory, recursively.
This is equivalent to the -d recurse or --directories=recurse option.
http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/grep1.html
grep help
$ grep --help
$ grep --help |grep recursive
-r, --recursive like --directories=recurse
-R, --dereference-recursive
Alternatives
ack (http://beyondgrep.com/)
ag (http://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)
Throwing my two cents here. As others already mentioned grep -r doesn't work on every platform. This may sound silly but I always use git.
git grep "texthere"
Even if the directory is not staged, I just stage it and use git grep.
Below are the command for search a String recursively on Unix and Linux environment.
for UNIX command is:
find . -name "string to be searched" -exec grep "text" "{}" \;
for Linux command is:
grep -r "string to be searched" .
In 2018, you want to use ripgrep or the-silver-searcher because they are way faster than the alternatives.
Here is a directory with 336 first-level subdirectories:
% find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | wc -l
336
% time rg -w aggs -g '*.py'
...
rg -w aggs -g '*.py' 1.24s user 2.23s system 283% cpu 1.222 total
% time ag -w aggs -G '.*py$'
...
ag -w aggs -G '.*py$' 2.71s user 1.55s system 116% cpu 3.651 total
% time find ./ -type f -name '*.py' | xargs grep -w aggs
...
find ./ -type f -name '*.py' 1.34s user 5.68s system 32% cpu 21.329 total
xargs grep -w aggs 6.65s user 0.49s system 32% cpu 22.164 total
On OSX, this installs ripgrep: brew install ripgrep. This installs silver-searcher: brew install the_silver_searcher.
In my IBM AIX Server (OS version: AIX 5.2), use:
find ./ -type f -print -exec grep -n -i "stringYouWannaFind" {} \;
this will print out path/file name and relative line number in the file like:
./inc/xxxx_x.h
2865: /** Description : stringYouWannaFind */
anyway,it works for me : )
For a list of available flags:
grep --help
Returns all matches for the regexp texthere in the current directory, with the corresponding line number:
grep -rn "texthere" .
Returns all matches for texthere, starting at the root directory, with the corresponding line number and ignoring case:
grep -rni "texthere" /
flags used here:
-r recursive
-n print line number with output
-i ignore case
Note that find . -type f | xargs grep whatever sorts of solutions will run into "Argument list to long" errors when there are too many files matched by find.
The best bet is grep -r but if that isn't available, use find . -type f -exec grep -H whatever {} \; instead.
I guess this is what you're trying to write
grep myText $(find .)
and this may be something else helpful if you want to find the files grep hit
grep myText $(find .) | cut -d : -f 1 | sort | uniq
For .gz files, recursively scan all files and directories
Change file type or put *
find . -name \*.gz -print0 | xargs -0 zgrep "STRING"
Just for fun, a quick and dirty search of *.txt files if the #christangrant answer is too much to type :-)
grep -r texthere .|grep .txt
Here's a recursive (tested lightly with bash and sh) function that traverses all subfolders of a given folder ($1) and using grep searches for given string ($3) in given files ($2):
$ cat script.sh
#!/bin/sh
cd "$1"
loop () {
for i in *
do
if [ -d "$i" ]
then
# echo entering "$i"
cd "$i"
loop "$1" "$2"
fi
done
if [ -f "$1" ]
then
grep -l "$2" "$PWD/$1"
fi
cd ..
}
loop "$2" "$3"
Running it and an example output:
$ sh script start_folder filename search_string
/home/james/start_folder/dir2/filename
Get the first matched files from grep command and get all the files don't contain some word, but input files for second grep comes from result files of first grep command.
grep -l -r --include "*.js" "FIRSTWORD" * | xargs grep "SECONDwORD"
grep -l -r --include "*.js" "FIRSTWORD" * | xargs grep -L "SECONDwORD"
dc0fd654-37df-4420-8ba5-6046a9dbe406
grep -l -r --include "*.js" "SEARCHWORD" * | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}' | xargs -I{} sh -c 'echo {}; grep -l -r --include "*.html" -w --include=*.js -e {} *; echo '''
5319778a-cec2-444d-bcc4-53d33821fedb

How can I calculate an MD5 checksum of a directory?

I need to calculate a summary MD5 checksum for all files of a particular type (*.py for example) placed under a directory and all sub-directories.
What is the best way to do that?
The proposed solutions are very nice, but this is not exactly what I need. I'm looking for a solution to get a single summary checksum which will uniquely identify the directory as a whole - including content of all its subdirectories.
Create a tar archive file on the fly and pipe that to md5sum:
tar c dir | md5sum
This produces a single MD5 hash value that should be unique to your file and sub-directory setup. No files are created on disk.
find /path/to/dir/ -type f -name "*.py" -exec md5sum {} + | awk '{print $1}' | sort | md5sum
The find command lists all the files that end in .py.
The MD5 hash value is computed for each .py file. AWK is used to pick off the MD5 hash values (ignoring the filenames, which may not be unique).
The MD5 hash values are sorted. The MD5 hash value of this sorted list is then returned.
I've tested this by copying a test directory:
rsync -a ~/pybin/ ~/pybin2/
I renamed some of the files in ~/pybin2.
The find...md5sum command returns the same output for both directories.
2bcf49a4d19ef9abd284311108d626f1 -
To take into account the file layout (paths), so the checksum changes if a file is renamed or moved, the command can be simplified:
find /path/to/dir/ -type f -name "*.py" -exec md5sum {} + | md5sum
On macOS with md5:
find /path/to/dir/ -type f -name "*.py" -exec md5 {} + | md5
ire_and_curses's suggestion of using tar c <dir> has some issues:
tar processes directory entries in the order which they are stored in the filesystem, and there is no way to change this order. This effectively can yield completely different results if you have the "same" directory on different places, and I know no way to fix this (tar cannot "sort" its input files in a particular order).
I usually care about whether groupid and ownerid numbers are the same, not necessarily whether the string representation of group/owner are the same. This is in line with what for example rsync -a --delete does: it synchronizes virtually everything (minus xattrs and acls), but it will sync owner and group based on their ID, not on string representation. So if you synced to a different system that doesn't necessarily have the same users/groups, you should add the --numeric-owner flag to tar
tar will include the filename of the directory you're checking itself, just something to be aware of.
As long as there is no fix for the first problem (or unless you're sure it does not affect you), I would not use this approach.
The proposed find-based solutions are also no good because they only include files, not directories, which becomes an issue if you the checksumming should keep in mind empty directories.
Finally, most suggested solutions don't sort consistently, because the collation might be different across systems.
This is the solution I came up with:
dir=<mydir>; (find "$dir" -type f -exec md5sum {} +; find "$dir" -type d) | LC_ALL=C sort | md5sum
Notes about this solution:
The LC_ALL=C is to ensure reliable sorting order across systems
This doesn't differentiate between a directory "named\nwithanewline" and two directories "named" and "withanewline", but the chance of that occurring seems very unlikely. One usually fixes this with a -print0 flag for find, but since there's other stuff going on here, I can only see solutions that would make the command more complicated than it's worth.
PS: one of my systems uses a limited busybox find which does not support -exec nor -print0 flags, and also it appends '/' to denote directories, while findutils find doesn't seem to, so for this machine I need to run:
dir=<mydir>; (find "$dir" -type f | while read f; do md5sum "$f"; done; find "$dir" -type d | sed 's#/$##') | LC_ALL=C sort | md5sum
Luckily, I have no files/directories with newlines in their names, so this is not an issue on that system.
If you only care about files and not empty directories, this works nicely:
find /path -type f | sort -u | xargs cat | md5sum
A solution which worked best for me:
find "$path" -type f -print0 | sort -z | xargs -r0 md5sum | md5sum
Reason why it worked best for me:
handles file names containing spaces
Ignores filesystem meta-data
Detects if file has been renamed
Issues with other answers:
Filesystem meta-data is not ignored for:
tar c - "$path" | md5sum
Does not handle file names containing spaces nor detects if file has been renamed:
find /path -type f | sort -u | xargs cat | md5sum
For the sake of completeness, there's md5deep(1); it's not directly applicable due to *.py filter requirement but should do fine together with find(1).
If you want one MD5 hash value spanning the whole directory, I would do something like
cat *.py | md5sum
Checksum all files, including both content and their filenames
grep -ar -e . /your/dir | md5sum | cut -c-32
Same as above, but only including *.py files
grep -ar -e . --include="*.py" /your/dir | md5sum | cut -c-32
You can also follow symlinks if you want
grep -aR -e . /your/dir | md5sum | cut -c-32
Other options you could consider using with grep
-s, --no-messages suppress error messages
-D, --devices=ACTION how to handle devices, FIFOs and sockets;
-Z, --null print 0 byte after FILE name
-U, --binary do not strip CR characters at EOL (MSDOS/Windows)
GNU find
find /path -type f -name "*.py" -exec md5sum "{}" +;
Technically you only need to run ls -lR *.py | md5sum. Unless you are worried about someone modifying the files and touching them back to their original dates and never changing the files' sizes, the output from ls should tell you if the file has changed. My unix-foo is weak so you might need some more command line parameters to get the create time and modification time to print. ls will also tell you if permissions on the files have changed (and I'm sure there are switches to turn that off if you don't care about that).
Using md5deep:
md5deep -r FOLDER | awk '{print $1}' | sort | md5sum
I want to add that if you are trying to do this for files/directories in a Git repository to track if they have changed, then this is the best approach:
git log -1 --format=format:%H --full-diff <file_or_dir_name>
And if it's not a Git directory/repository, then the answer by ire_and_curses is probably the best bet:
tar c <dir_name> | md5sum
However, please note that tar command will change the output hash if you run it in a different OS and stuff. If you want to be immune to that, this is the best approach, even though it doesn't look very elegant on first sight:
find <dir_name> -type f -print0 | sort -z | xargs -0 md5sum | md5sum | awk '{ print $1 }'
md5sum worked fine for me, but I had issues with sort and sorting file names. So instead I sorted by md5sum result. I also needed to exclude some files in order to create comparable results.
find . -type f -print0 \
| xargs -r0 md5sum \
| grep -v ".env" \
| grep -v "vendor/autoload.php" \
| grep -v "vendor/composer/" \
| sort -d \
| md5sum
I had the same problem so I came up with this script that just lists the MD5 hash values of the files in the directory and if it finds a subdirectory it runs again from there, for this to happen the script has to be able to run through the current directory or from a subdirectory if said argument is passed in $1
#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
# loop in current dir
ls | while read line; do
ecriv=`pwd`"/"$line
if [ -f $ecriv ] ; then
md5sum "$ecriv"
elif [ -d $ecriv ] ; then
sh myScript "$line" # call this script again
fi
done
else # if a directory is specified in argument $1
ls "$1" | while read line; do
ecriv=`pwd`"/$1/"$line
if [ -f $ecriv ] ; then
md5sum "$ecriv"
elif [ -d $ecriv ] ; then
sh myScript "$line"
fi
done
fi
If you want really independence from the file system attributes and from the bit-level differences of some tar versions, you could use cpio:
cpio -i -e theDirname | md5sum
There are two more solutions:
Create:
du -csxb /path | md5sum > file
ls -alR -I dev -I run -I sys -I tmp -I proc /path | md5sum > /tmp/file
Check:
du -csxb /path | md5sum -c file
ls -alR -I dev -I run -I sys -I tmp -I proc /path | md5sum -c /tmp/file

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