Comments on: Finding a File containing a particular text string in Linux server

By: shawn

shawn — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:17:44 +0000

re: da_bull97, i’ve recently been hacked, and I used this command to find a specific word on my server throughout 100+ sites > and save the result to a text file.

grep -r “base64_decode” /home/ > /home/domain/public_html/results.txt

By: da_bull97

da_bull97 — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 06:12:14 +0000

I have an interesting question that ive been searching for a long time. would there be any way, to use a grep command to search for files based on words found in a text file?

for example, lets say i have a text file with the names of a bunch of songs i want to delete from directory /home/music. I want to be able to create a script that would search for the songs in /home/music from the text file.

any ideas?

By: Search_it

Search_it — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:21:02 +0000

Hello,
I want to search string ,but i dont know that string present in which file name or where it is present.Is there any unix command for searching such kind of string.?

By: alan

alan — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 19:04:41 +0000

I am totally green in this… can anyone tell me how to find files which contain the same name of file and the same string in file? [name of file = file contain the same string/ text as name of the file]

By: clark

clark — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 03:49:35 +0000

for my version of linux, I had to move the -print in front. plus i added some params for grep

find . -type f -print -exec grep -inH “redeem reward” {} \;

By: Karthick K

Karthick K — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:48:01 +0000

I have to move n number of files from one path to another path. No matter what the file name is. Can I get the command for doing this? Unix as well as in Windows.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Karthick K

By: Vivek M Garg

Vivek M Garg — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:00:18 +0000

Can also try grep -r “\-g” /home/user/src

It works in Linux.

– ‘-g’ also works as sugested by Vivek Gite

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 07:14:22 +0000

grep -r -- '-g' /home/user/src

By: chris pepper

chris pepper — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:14:49 +0000

how do i search for a string containing “-g” ?? whenever i do
grep -r “-g” /home/user/src

it says “invalid option -g” how do i stop it picking it up as an option? I also tried

grep -r “cc” /home/user/src/*.mak and it says:
” /home/user/src/*.mak: no such file or directory” is this because of the -r option?

I appreciate any help!

-Thanks, Chris

By: Carsten

Carsten — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:35:00 +0000

Hi T.,

use: grep “\b2012.\{12\}\b”

That means: any word (marked by \b) starting with 2012 followed by any character (“.”) repeated 12 times.

Carsten

By: Tlucz-huba

Tlucz-huba — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 08:44:20 +0000

Hi guys,

can you please help me out with a grep command to find a 16 chars long string that starts with number ’2012′ and then followed by any characters?

Thank you,

By: lindsey

lindsey — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 01:47:07 +0000

this works but again, i have to know hte positions to make it work correctly:
# ps -aefk | awk ‘/-Xm/ {print $14,$15,$NF}’
-Xms256m -Xmx1024m server1
-Xms50m -Xmx256m nodeagent

By: lindsey

lindsey — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 01:45:39 +0000

hi all, kind of a continuation of the original Q but need text from the “process table” in AIX not a file:
java process & need to parse out anything “-Xm”, appreciate any help, been banging my head trying: awk, cut, sed (noob here), perl (noob here) and it kinda works but i have to figure out the “positions of the fields” i need to make them work ($15,$16,$NF), i need a way to parse an unknown ‘position in a string’. hope this makes sense, thx much.

By: Me

Me — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 08:56:05 +0000

grep -Hr “TEXT_TO_FIND”

i.e. grep -Hr “Me” /home/earth

By: Russ

Russ — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:12:09 +0000

great people, helpful but what Vivek write is for me to difficult. May be it’s time to start learning sed or awk :-)
Thx2all

By: Vivek

Vivek — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:24:42 +0000

Welcome !

Yes it’s short & better for sure. Did not try with -exec earlier.
Perfect if there are no blank spaces / special characters in file names.

Take care.
Vivek M Garg

By: Albert

Albert — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:10:29 +0000

thanks!!!

i found a nother way to do that:

find /home/ -exec grep -l “mp3″ {} \; | xargs rm

i hope this help someone

By: Vivek

Vivek — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:56:17 +0000

Let’s assume:-
files to search = *.txt
Directory to be searched=/tmp
search string=hello
Let’s also assume that file names *.txt also contain blank spaces as
“/tmp/1st file.txt”
First verify that you get the names of the correct files to be deleted as follows:

# find /tmp -type f -name ‘*.txt*’ | sed -e ‘s/.*/\”&\”/’ |xargs -n 1 grep -l hello|sed -e ‘s/.*/\”&\”/’

( Here sed is used to deal with blank spaces within file names )

After confirming that the results are ok, files can be deleted by piping & xargs as follows:

# find /tmp -type f -name ‘*.txt*’ | sed -e ‘s/.*/\”&\”/’ |xargs -n 1 grep -l hello|sed -e ‘s/.*/\”&\”/’|xargs -n 1 rm -f

Note: If the search string has blank spaces, place the entire “search string” within “Double quotes” .

By: Albert

Albert — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 20:58:10 +0000

how can i search for a specific file content and delete them like a:

all file who have the word “hello” for example

By: Vatar

Vatar — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:31:06 +0000

find . -type f -exec grep -i “redeem reward” {} \; -print 2>/dev/null
to get rid of
grep: can’t open ./var/adm/log/secret.log