Grep only subdirectories matching pattern

grep

I have a directory tree consisting of several thousand subdirectories, but I frequently need to grep only a small subset of those directories. How can I grep only those subdirectories matching a pattern?

For example, suppose I have these subdirectories which I want to grep in:

...
...
...
/foo
/fooLib
/fooHandler
/fooGizmo
...
...
...

The ... entries above represent the thousands of other directories I don't want to grep in.

Supposing I'm looking for all instances of bar, if I do this:

grep -n --recursive bar *

I would find what I'm looking for, but in all of the directories. How can I search in only those subdirectories matching the pattern foo*?

Best Answer

You can use grep and find combination as below :

find /{foo,fooLib,fooHandler,fooGizmo} -type f -exec grep -l "test" {} \;

Or you can use

find /foo* -type f -exec grep -l "test" {} \;

Or using grep only

grep -R "test" /foo*

Related Solutions

Grep to find instances of “Foo” where “Bar” does not appear within 10 lines

With pcregrep:

pcregrep --include='\.cpp$' -rnM 'Foo(?!(?:.*\n){0,2}.*Bar)' .

The key is in the -M option which is unique to pcregrep and is used to match multiple lines (pcregrep pulls more data from the input file as necessary when walking the RE demands it).

(?!...) is the perl/PCRE negative look-ahead RE operator. Foo(?!...) matches Foo as long as ... does not match what follows.

... being (?:.*\n){0,2}.*Bar (. not matching a newline character), that is from 0 to 2 lines followed by a line containing Bar.

Grep – How to Match Pattern Exactly from File and Search Only in First Column

You probably want the -wflag - from man grep

   -w, --word-regexp
          Select  only  those  lines  containing  matches  that form whole
          words.  The test is that the matching substring must  either  be
          at  the  beginning  of  the  line,  or  preceded  by  a non-word
          constituent character.  Similarly, it must be either at the  end
          of  the  line  or  followed by a non-word constituent character.
          Word-constituent  characters  are  letters,  digits,   and   the
          underscore.

i.e.

grep -wFf patfile file
denovo1 xxx yyyy oggugu ddddd
denovo22 hhhh yyyy kkkk iiii

To enforce matching only in the first column, you would need to modify the entries in the pattern file to add a line anchor: you could also make use of the \b word anchor instead of the command-line -w switch e.g. in patfile:

^denovo1\b
^denovo3\b
^denovo22\b

then

grep -f patfile file
denovo1 xxx yyyy oggugu ddddd
denovo22 hhhh yyyy kkkk iiii

Note that you must drop the -F switch if the file contains regular expressions instead of simple fixed strings.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Grep to find instances of “Foo” where “Bar” does not appear within 10 lines

Grep – How to Match Pattern Exactly from File and Search Only in First Column

Related Question