That’s It! If you know any other command-line trick to find string or word in files, do share with us or ask any questions regarding this topic, use the comment form below. $ grep -Rinw ~/bin/ -e 'check_root' -e 'netstat' In addition, it is possible to search for more than one pattern, using the following command. $ grep -Rnw -include=\*.sh ~/bin/ -e 'check_root' This example instructs grep to only look through all. $ grep -Rinw ~/bin/ -e 'check_root'Īssuming there are several types of files in a directory you wish to search in, you can also specify the type of files to be searched for instance, by their extension using the -include option. If you want to know the exact line where the string of text exist, include the -n option. To ignore case distinctions employ the -i option as shown: $ grep -Riw ~/bin/ -e 'check_root' You should use the sudo command when searching certain directories or files that require root permissions (unless you are managing your system with the root account). Where the -R option tells grep to read all files under each directory, recursively, following symbolic links only if they are on the command line and option -w instructs it to select only those lines containing matches that form whole words, and -e is used to specify the string (pattern) to be searched. The command below will list all files containing a line with the text “ check_root”, by recursively and aggressively searching the ~/bin directory. Read Also: 11 Advanced Linux ‘Grep’ Commands on Character Classes and Bracket Expressions
#Search for text in files in linux grep nr how to#
This article will guide you on how to do that, you will learn how to recursively dig through directories to find and list all files that contain a given string of text.Ī simple way to work this out is by using grep pattern searching tool, is a powerful, efficient, reliable and most popular command-line utility for finding patterns and words from files or directories on Unix-like systems. In the picture above you can see that there are two instances of the top program running.Do you want to find all files that contain a particular word or string of text on your entire Linux system or a given directory. If we know the exact name of the process, we can pipe the output to the grep command: Search and display the total number of times that the string ‘nixcraft’ appears in a file named frontpage. The ps -A command produces a lot of output. Look for all files in the current directory and in all of its subdirectories in Linux for the word ‘httpd’: grep -R httpd. The -i flag ( grep -i ) makes the search case. We can use the ps -A command to display all running processes on the system: Resources Adding the -color flag ( grep -color ) will highlight the matched portion of the line in red. Here is an another example of the usefulness of the grep command. Or, we could pipe the output to the grep command and display only the lines of text that contain the word cdrom: We can then scroll through the output and find the cdrom group and its members. We can do this by typing the cat /etc/group command, which will display all the groups and their members on the system: For example, suppose that we would like to display the members of the group cdrom. Grep is most commonly used in conjunction with commands that produce a lot of output, so you can sift through that output for the lines that are important to you. Note that the grep command has listed the filename and the line of the text containing the keyword bob. The -r option specifies that the subdirectories will also be searched. In the picture above we can see that there are two occurrences of the word bob in the files inside the /home/bob directory. If we want to search the directory /home/bob for each occurence of the word bob, we can use the following command: The syntax is:įor example, if we want to search the file bobs_file.txt for each occurence of the word bob, we can use the following command: By default, grep prints the matching line of text. You can search a single file or a whole directory of files. Searching a file for a text string with grep. For example, let’s search our document.txt text document for the string example.
The grep tool is used to locates files by scanning their content. To search a file for a text string, use the following command syntax: grep string filename.
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