Ubuntu – How to use “grep” command to find text including subdirectories

command linegrep

I want to find all files which contain a specific string of text. The grep command works, but I don't know how to use it for every directory (I can only do it for my current directory). I tried reading man grep, but it didn't yield any help.

Best Answer

It would be better to use

grep -rl "string" /path

where

-r (or --recursive) option is used to traverse also all sub-directories of /path, whereas
-l (or --files-with-matches) option is used to only print filenames of matching files, and not the matching lines (this could also improve the speed, given that grep stop reading a file at first match with this option).

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to use grep to find all the zip files in a directory

You should really use find instead.

find <dir> -iname \*.zip

Example: to search for all .zip files in current directory and all sub-directories try this:

find . -iname \*.zip

This will list all files ending with .zip regarding of case. If you only want the ones with lower-case change -iname to -name

The command grep searches for stings in files, not for files. You can use it with find to list all your .zip files like this

find . |grep -e "\.zip$"

Ubuntu – Grep through subdirectories

Use the -R (equivalent to --recursive) option to grep.

EDIT: after reading the thread, in the combination ls /mydata | grep txt$ you do not need recursive grep, but recursive ls. You do not grep the files; you grep the output of ls, which happens to be a list of files.

"Recursive ls" is called find :-)

find /mydata -type f | grep txt$

or, better,

find /mydata -type f -name '*.txt'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to use grep to find all the zip files in a directory

Ubuntu – Grep through subdirectories

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