Comments on: How To Find Files by Content Under UNIX

By: yoander

yoander — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:16:36 +0000

Dave -R option means recursive so if you want to search for every *.c file that contains fred keyword you must type: grep -i ‘fred’ DIR/*.c, if exists *.c in DIR/SUBDIR then you must combine find, xargs and grep

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:31:41 +0000

Tried
grep -iR ‘fred’ *.c
only to be told *.c : no such file or directory
of course a quick look in the sub directories does reveal some *.c files.

I really would love to know why some people think linux is better than cpm… for heavens sake doesn’t anything actually work with this mess?

By: Vijay

Vijay — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:56:57 +0000

Thanks a lot for valuable posts.

By: Carl

Carl — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:00:43 +0000

thanks, didn’t know that. I thought it was possible, but I didn’t know how to achieve this and so the -exec option was easier, since it’s pretty obvious to surround the {} with “.

By: yoander (sedlav)

yoander (sedlav) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:58:30 +0000

You can deal with path containing spaces using -print0 and -0 options for find and xargs commands respectively

By: Carl

Carl — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:00:59 +0000

I prefer using finds -exec option instead of the pipe and xargs, because with this I managed to deal with paths containing spaces, which are not searched by using the simple pipe/xargs combination in this example.

find . -type f -print -exec grep –color=auto –no-messages -nH “search string” “{}” \;

By: yoander

yoander — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:51:52 +0000

If you want to get a list o file where the string match the you must use -l option: grep -l ‘main(‘ *.c

By: sathiya

sathiya — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:07:57 +0000

when you want to copy all the files which contains the specified function name.,

find -iname “*.c” -exec grep -l ‘main(‘ {} \; -a -exec cp {} test1/ \;

By: Vaishnavi

Vaishnavi — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 04:18:43 +0000

find . -type f -name “*.c” -print \
-exec grep -s “main(” {}\;

This command should also work

By: mhernandez

mhernandez — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:03:04 +0000

@henry

find ./bin -name “cp”

If you were trying to find where cp program lies, you can use
which cp

By: henry

henry — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:54:28 +0000

Hello,
i was trying to use the find or grep commands to search for the cp command in the ./bin directory but i couldn’t get it. could you teach me how to get it. i know it’s there. just want to try out the find and the grep commands.

By: _

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 11:17:11 +0000

egrep -ri word location/folder/*

By: vivek

vivek — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:53:14 +0000

@mhernandez,

Thanks for your post, I’ve update FAQ.

@Gokdeniz,

I will check it out ack and will update faq with it.

@mhymn,

Try offical pdf tool as follows:
acroread /a search='word' *.pdf

Appreciate all of your posts.

By: Gokdeniz Karadag

Gokdeniz Karadag — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:43:52 +0000

"ack" is a really better alternative to grep. It is especially useful for programmers because it skips temporary files and version control files by default and searches only on code files. It searches recursively by default. check it out.

By: mhernandez

mhernandez — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:16:12 +0000

Hi and tanks for all your tips!

I also find useful invoking grep with -nH, so that it also shows the file and the line that contains the pattern.

Sometimes, -E or -P options come handy too, because they allow me to search for regexp.

Have a lot of fun…

By: mhymn

mhymn — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:10:38 +0000

Thanks for the good tip,
But what a bout PDF files? you mentioned only text type of files which grep can work with them, I need to know the trick for the PDF files :/