Search inside text files....

[Christine S Feeley]

I am looking for a text file that contains a particular word in the text of the file itself, not the file name. I know the file is located in one of four rather large directory structures.

Is there a command or series of commands that will give me a list of all the files that contain this word and the files location?

[Steven E. Protter]

find /example -exec grep -l 'Where are you' {} \;

That output can be redirected to a file.

Thanks.

SEP

[Pete Randall]

find /dir1 /dir2 /dir3 /dir4 -type f -exec grep -l "text_string" {} \;


Pete

[Steve Steel · Accepted solution]

Hi


find /dir -type f|xargs grep -il word


Make a subdirectory and use ln -s to make aliases for the 4 directories and you can start in one place with

find . -follow|xargs grep -il word


Either way you get the file names back


Steve Steel

[Muthukumar_5]

You can do it by using grep command with find as,

grep -n '/pattern or word/' `find $PWD -name "file-pattern"`

Try to use effective file pattern else fidn will try to check binary executable files too.

or use as like,

find . -type f -print |xargs grep xyz

If you like this, find command output will be used to search patter xyz on that.

[Christine S Feeley]

Thanks for all the help....the first two returned a lot of errors. The last two replies worked well, and I found the file I was looking for.