How to grep for the whole word

Question

I am using the following command to grep stuff in subdirs

find . | xargs grep -s \'s:text\'

However, this also finds stuff like

Answer 1

You can drop the xargs command by making grep search recursively. And you normally don't need the 's' flag. Hence:

grep -wr 's:text' 

Answer 2

Use \b to match on "word boundaries", which will make your search match on whole words only.

So your grep would look something like

grep -r "\bSTRING\b"

adding color and line numbers might help too

grep --color -rn "\bSTRING\b"

From http://www.regular-expressions.info/wordboundaries.html:

There are three different positions that qualify as word boundaries:

• Before the first character in the string, if the first character is a word character.
• After the last character in the string, if the last character is a word character.
• Between two characters in the string, where one is a word character and the other is not a word character.

Answer 3

If you just want to filter out the remainder text part, you can do this.

xargs grep -s 's:text '

This should find only s:text instances with a space after the last t. If you need to find s:text instances that only have a name element, either pipe your results to another grep expression, or use regex to filter only the elements you need.

Answer 4

You want the -w option to specify that it's the end of a word.

find . | xargs grep -sw 's:text'

Answer 5

you could try rg, https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep :

rg -w 's:text' . 

should do it