How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?

Answer 1

grep -insr "pattern" *

• i: Ignore case distinctions in both the PATTERN and the input files.
• n: Prefix each line of output with the 1-based line number within its input file.
• s: Suppress error messages about nonexistent or unreadable files.
• r: Read all files under each directory, recursively.

Answer 2

Use:

grep -c Your_Pattern *

This will report how many copies of your pattern are there in each of the files in the current directory.

Answer 3

Try:

find / -type f -exec grep -H 'text-to-find-here' {} \;

which will search all file systems, because / is the root folder.

For home folder use:

find ~/ -type f -exec grep -H 'text-to-find-here' {} \;

For current folder use:

find ./ -type f -exec grep -H 'text-to-find-here' {} \;

Answer 4

You can use:

grep -r "string to be searched"  /path/to/dir

The r stands for recursive and so will search in the path specified and also its sub-directories. This will tell you the file name as well as print out the line in the file where the string appears.

Or a command similar to the one you are trying (example: ) for searching in all javascript files (*.js):

find . -name '*.js' -exec grep -i 'string to search for' {} \; -print

This will print the lines in the files where the text appears, but it does not print the file name.

In addition to this command, we can write this too: grep -rn "String to search" /path/to/directory/or/file -r: recursive search n: line number will be shown for matches

Answer 5

Do the following:

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'

• -r or -R is recursive,
• -n is line number, and
• -w stands for match the whole word.
• -l (lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.

Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:

• This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:

  grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
  

• This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:

  grep --exclude=\*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
  

• For directories it's possible to exclude one or more directories using the --exclude-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:

  grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
  

This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.

For more options check man grep.

Answer 6

List of file names containing a given text

First of all, I believe you have used -H instead of -l. Also you can try adding the text inside quotes followed by {} \.

find / -type f -exec grep -l "text-to-find-here" {} \; 

Example

Let's say you are searching for files containing specific text "Apache License" inside your directory. It will display results somewhat similar to below (output will be different based on your directory content).

bash-4.1$ find . -type f -exec grep -l "Apache License" {} \; 
./net/java/jvnet-parent/5/jvnet-parent-5.pom
./commons-cli/commons-cli/1.3.1/commons-cli-1.3.1.pom
./io/swagger/swagger-project/1.5.10/swagger-project-1.5.10.pom
./io/netty/netty-transport/4.1.7.Final/netty-transport-4.1.7.Final.pom
./commons-codec/commons-codec/1.9/commons-codec-1.9.pom
./commons-io/commons-io/2.4/commons-io-2.4.pom
bash-4.1$ 

Remove case sensitiveness

Even if you are not use about the case like "text" vs "TEXT", you can use the -i switch to ignore case. You can read further details here.

Hope this helps you.