Finding a string in a file

[JUAN_17]

Hello everybody!!

How i can find a string in a file?

Sorry, but i'm a "freshman" in HPUX-11

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

# grep thestring filename

For example, if you want to find the string "host" in the file '/etc/hosts' you would do:

# grep hosts /etc/hosts

See the man pages for 'grep'.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Geoff Wild]

You can use grep, or cat and pipe to awk.

RGds...Geoff

[John Poff]

Hi,

One way to find a string in a file is with the 'grep' command:

grep somestring filename

Do a 'man grep' and take a look at the docs. There are lots of regular expressions you can use for finding strings.

JP

[V. Nyga]

Hi,

two possibilities:

grep -i 'string' *
gives you the filename and the line with the string.

If you edit a file with vi:
/string 'enter'
get the curser to the string.

More questions?

Volkmar

[Jon Mattatall]

Depends...

If you're at a prompt -
grep "string" /path/to/filename

If in "vi" -
/string will take you to the first occurence of the string, "n" takes you to the next.

[Domenico_5]

grep file

[JUAN_17]

Gracias a todos!!

thanks to all of you!!

Every day, i learn more...

[Donny Jekels]

freshman huh? welcome to the free world.

grep is the tool you need to study.

grep -v something *

will print all the lines in all the files in the present directory, EXCEPT the lines that contain "something" - cool right?

grep -E "name && lastname" filename

will get name and lastname out of a file.

grep -E "name || lastname" filename

will get either name or lastname out of the file.

enough from the peanut galary -

hack away - peace
Donny

[Kelli Ward]

Here's a fun one.

Want to find a text string in a file, but do not know which file or where to look?

cd to root - cd /
and type:

find . -type f -exec grep -l '' {} \;

Has been invaluable for me at times.

Note: Can be a resource hog and take a long time if you have a substantial filesystem.

Enjoy HP-UX!

Kel

[Carl_35]

You can also use the command "strings" to find text strings in a binary file.

This is useful when looking for error messages, or other messages, when you don't have source code.

Again, this usually gets piped through grep...

strings | grep

By the way, none of these answers is specific to hp-ux, they'll work with any unix/linux system.

Enjoy!