Oct 11
12

How to Search for Text in Files Using Linux

5 Comments

Introduction
There may be times when the name of a required file is unknown but you may remember some of the content of a file. A search can be performed in a Linux terminal that will display a list of files that contains the text you remember.

The Command
The command that will be used is “find” with “xargs” and “grep”. A few options are supplied to the command to only print out file names and also not search in hidden directories. This will result in a neat readable output.

find <directory to search> -type f | xargs grep -rl '<text to search for>'

 
Example
If I wanted to search a hypothetical backup directory (/ftp/backup) for the text “mpshouse”:

find /ftp/backup/ -type f | xargs grep -rl 'mpshouse'

There is more than one way of searching for text in files, this is just one.

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Posted in Linux by bill 5 Comments

5 Responses to "How to Search for Text in Files Using Linux"

  • dj says:
    13 October , 2011 at 7:18 am
    Reply

    if this is gnu grep, then the -r is for “recursive” … as in recurse through the named directory. but your “-type f” flag in find eliminates directories.

    just an observation….

  • Geoff says:
    13 October , 2011 at 7:49 am
    Reply

    You can have find execute grep itself, with argument aggregation, by using the “+” terminator for -exec, so no need for xargs:

    find /ftp/backup/ -type f -exec grep -l ‘mpshouse’ {} +

    This also works fine with pathnames containing blanks and quotes, whereas find | xargs doesn’t (unless you use find … -print0 | xargs -0 … but that is not widely supported, whereas find -exec … {} + is POSIX standard).

  • Arun Maurya says:
    13 October , 2011 at 8:41 am
    Reply

    try to use
    #grep -rl ‘mpshouse’ /ftp/backup/*

  • bill says:
    13 October , 2011 at 10:06 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much for all the comments, I really appreciate them. This post was for people that had no idea how to search for text in files and I knew there would be a few comments of peoples favourite ways hence my last line in the post “There is more than one way of searching for text in files, this is just one.”

    I just tried to do it in a way that used xargs.

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