How do I search for a particular string inside of a File?

[Shaun Aldrich]

Hello Everyone,

Just a quick and probably very easy question I am trying to find out. Does anyone know how do I search for a particular string inside of a file?

This is different than from the command line where I usually use the Find command.

Thanks in advance for your help....

S Aldrich

[Alan Riggs]

The command you want is grep.

grep "string" file(s)

[Rick Garland]

The command 'grep' is what you would use. There are options to grep so as to be case insensitive or to match exactly or to ...

[Shaun Aldrich]

Thanks for the responses... I will need to rephrase the question to How can I search for a particular string inside of a File scanning multiple directories & paths? If you use grep that is just for the local directory.

Thanks for your help....

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

Use a combination of find and grep:

grep $STRING `find . -print` `find /other/paths/ -name "pattern" -print`

ie. search from current directory downwards as well as /other/paths/

[Timothy Czarnik]

Shaun,

Perhaps this may help:

for file in $(ls //*)
do
grep -l "string" $file
done

From the command line, this will create a listing of all files under the directory. The -l (ell) in grep tells it to print the filename if the "string" is found.

Ugly, but it'll work.

-Tim

[James R. Ferguson]

Shaun:

Imagine you want to find all files in /tmp whose name start with "f", and you want to search them for the string "hello" but don't care about the case of the letters. Then, do:

# find /tmp -name f\* -print -exec grep -i hello {} \;

...JRF...

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Use this command "cat filename |grep string"

[Dan Hetzel]

In case you search in a VERY large number
of files, and to avoid the "argument list
too long message", use a construct like:

find / -name "*.txt" | xargs grep mypattern

Hope this helps,

Dan

[Dan Hetzel]

Hey, Cool !!

I've been awarded my first 9 points !!

Thanks
Dan

[Kevin Ernst]

A command line like

find . -type f -exec grep "string" {} ;

works well, except it's hard to tell exactly *which* files matched the string. (Grep won't echo the filename if it only received one file in its argument list, which is the case when used with a 'find -exec' command.) You can fix this by piping through 'xargs,' which will pass as many arguments as it can to 'grep' on a single command line (within the compiled-in restrictions on environment size). Grep then echos each matched line preceded by ": ".

Or use GNU grep (download the depot at http://hpux.cae.wisc.edu , or a local mirror), which has a -H option to force printing of the filename:

find . -type f -exec ggrep -H "string" {} ;

(And the incredibly useful '-C' option for printing the matched line along with several lines of 'context.')

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Shaun:

With regard to the last post by Kevin, add the '-print' option to see the file name. Thus:

# find . -print -type f -exec grep "string" {} \;

will show the filename along with the "string".

...JRF...

[Kevin Ernst]

Well, I just learned something. =)