Bash – grep for multiple strings in files, and then list the files in the order of size

bashgrepshell

I am in a folder with lots of .txt file, I would like to find all the files which contain both stringA and stringB (not necessarily on the same line), then list these files in the order of the size (from small to big)

I have tried the follows, but it doesn't work:

ls -lS | for f in *; do grep -q stringA $f && grep -l stringB $f; done

Does anyone have a good idea?

Best Answer

You can use GNU find:

find . -maxdepth 1 -exec grep -q stringA {} \; -exec grep -q stringB {} \; \
        -printf '%10s %p\n' | 
    sort -n

Faster Alternative

If your log files are large and you are grepping for fixed words, as opposed to fancy regular expressions, you may want to consider this approach:

inc='hello
animal
atttribute
metadata'

exc='timeout
runner'

ssh office "grep -F '$inc' ptd.log | grep -vF '$exc'"

By putting each word on a separate line, we can use grep's -F feature for fixed strings. This turns off regex processing, making the process faster.

Grep – How to Grep Word Within a File and Copy the File

Try:

grep -rl --null --include '*.txt' LINUX/UNIX . | xargs -0r cp -t /path/to/dest

Because this command uses NUL-separation, it is safe for all file names including those with difficult names that include blanks, tabs, or even newlines.

The above requires GNU cp. For MacOS/FreeBSD, try:

grep -rl --null --include '*.txt' LINUX/UNIX . | xargs -0 sh -c 'cp "$@" /path/to/dest' sh

How it works:

grep options and arguments
- -r tells grep to search recursively through the directory structure. (On FreeBSD, -r will follow symlinks into directories. This is not true of either OS/X or recent versions of GNU grep.)
- --include '*.txt' tells grep to only return files whose names match the glob *.txt (including hidden ones like .foo.txt or .txt).
- -l tells grep to only return the names of matching files, not the match itself.
- --null tells grep to use NUL characters to separate the file names. (--null is supported by grep under GNU/Linux, MacOS and FreeBSD but not OpenBSD.)
- LINUX/UNIX tells grep to look only for files whose contents include the regex LINUX/UNIX
- . search in the current directory. You can omit it in recent versions of GNU grep, but then you'd need to pass a -- option terminator to cp to guard against file names that start with -.
xargs options and arguments
- -0 tells xargs to expect NUL-separated input.
- -r tells xargs not to run the command unless at least one file was found. (This option is not needed on either BSD or OSX and is not compatible with OSX's xargs.)
- cp -t /path/to/dest copies the directories to the target directory. (-t requires GNU cp.)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – How to do a grep on remote machine and print out the line which contains those words

Faster Alternative

Grep – How to Grep Word Within a File and Copy the File

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