find help 2

[sm42]

Hello

What's the command to grep for a particular text in a directory?
I'm looking for text in a number of files and subdirectories.

 

[bfitzmai]

Go to the top directory that you want to grep for particular text and try command:

find . -type f | grep <Text>

 

[SamBones]

That will only see if the text is in the name of the file, not inside the file. This will examine the files for the text...

find /startingdir -type f -exec grep <Text> {} \; -print

The path and name of the file will printed after the lines found with the text in them.

Hope this helps.

 

[elgrandeperro]

Oh SamBones, thanks the last "-print". Find arguments are so convoluted, I did not know you could do that!

gene

 

[SamBones]

The trick to [tt]find[/tt] is, each argument is executed left to right, only as far as an argument evaluates as true. As soon as one of the arguments evaluates to false, it stops and goes to the next file found. In other words, by having the "[tt]-print[/tt]" after the "[tt]-exec grep ...[/tt]", it will only print the file name if the grep found something. If the text isn't in the file, the file name isn't printed. If the "[tt]-print[/tt]" was put before the "[tt]-exec grep ...[/tt]", then it would print every single file from the starting directory down, with the text from the grep following only the filenames that had it. That can be a lot of output.

Hope this helps.