XFCE4 terminal is my personal preference. The option H tells grep to print the file name when it finds the text (something it doesn’t normally do if it searches a single file). To find files containing specific text in Linux, do the following.
You might also like: How to Find Files Containing Specific Text String in Linux One such parameter is the timestamp of the file. These parameters can be the filename, size, type of file, etc. The escaped semicolon “\ ” tells -exec where the command ends. The find command in Linux is used to search for files and folders based on different parameters. You dont need to open a text file in the program on start, as it does not matter for the find operation that you are about to run. name "*.js" -exec grep -iH foo have been replaced with the name. Start Notepad++ on your system to get started with the operation. In other words, it will look into sub-directories too. The -r option read/sarch all files under each directory, recursively, following symbolic links only if they are on the command line. You can broaden the results by using wildcards. The syntax is as follows for the grep command to find all files under Linux or Unix in the current directory: cd /path/to/dir. It returns a list of the matching words or shows each line of text that contains them.
Solution: let “find” call “grep”, as follows.įind. 10 UNIX Grep Command Examples of How to Search a File for a Pattern The UNIX Grep command searches files for a user-specified text pattern. Problems: With many files, the command can become too long and grow beyond the maximum allowed number of characters.įurthermore, the above doesn’t work well with directories whose names have spaces in them. The option i ensure that the search is case-insensitive. Go through a list of files, search for the text “foo”:.Insert that list after “foo”: backquotes.Read Also: 10 Useful Linux Chaining Operators with Practical Examples. This is where using regular expressions comes in handy. Assemble a list of all JavaScript files in the current directory: When we run certain commands in Unix/Linux to read or edit text from a string or file, we most times try to filter output to a given section of interest.The easiest way to do this is to execute the command The power of this stream editor is in its easiness in accomplishing basic input streams transformation. cat test.txt View Text File in Linux Using Sed to Find and Replace Text, Word, or String in a File. This post shows you how to use “find” and “grep” to search for a text string in all files that are directly or indirectly contained in a given directory.Įxample: Find all JavaScript files in the current directory and search for the word “foo”. We will be using the cat command to flexible note the changes on our created test file.