Linux command: find files and run command on them

command linelinux

How do I manage to find all files in a directory and subdirectories and run a command on them?

For example,

find . -type f -name "*.txt"

finds all txt files and:

find . -type f -name "*.txt" | gedit

sends it to gedit, but inside a text file. I want gedit to open all text files.

Best Answer

You can use the -exec flag to execute a command on each matching file:

$ find ./ -type f -name "*.txt" -exec gedit "{}" \;

Syntax

The syntax is a bit strange (see -exec command ; in the manpages for more):

The string `{}' is replaced by the current file name being processed

You may also want to consider -execdir, which will do the same, but executes the command from the subdirectory containing the matched file (this is generally preferable).

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Try

find /srv/www/*/htdocs/system/application/ -name "*.php" -exec grep "debug (" {} \; -print

This should recursively search the folders under application for files with .php extension and pass them to grep.

An optimization on this would be to execute:

find /srv/www/*/htdocs/system/application/ -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -H "debug ("

This uses xargs to pass all the .php files output by find as arguments to a single grep command; e.g., grep "debug (" file1 file2 file3. The -print0 option of find and -0 option of xargs ensure the spaces in file and directory names are correctly handled. The -H option passed to grep ensures that the filename is printed in all situations. (By default, grep prints the filename only when multiple arguments are passed in.)

From man xargs:

-0
Input items are terminated by a null character instead of by whitespace, and the quotes and backslash are not special (every character is taken literally). Disables the end of file string, which is treated like any other argument. Useful when input items might contain white space, quote marks, or backslashes. The GNU find -print0 option produces input suitable for this mode.

Linux – recursively replace every instance of a word in a directory from linux command line

You could use find and perl (via xargs):

find /target/directory -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/stringtoreplace/replacement/g'

or if you are already in the right directory

find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/stringtoreplace/replacement/g'

and if you only want to replace in, say, html files:

find . -type f -name '*html' | xargs perl -pi -e 's/stringtoreplace/replacement/g'

You don't have to use perl of course, any tool that performs search and replace operations will do, and not doubt there are several available that are less resource hungry than starting perl (which is this case is a sledge-hammer to crack a nut, but it is an example I've had stored for ages and I've no reason to find a more efficient version). My original source for the "trick" is http://oreilly.com/pub/h/73

You can use all the options in which-ever tool you choose, so in this case the full power of Perl's regular expressions. The page linked to above has more examples, including how to search in a case in-sensitive manner.

Best Answer

Syntax

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