Grep -r (recursive), remove/hide all directories

grep

Noob here – I want to run grep -r asdf however, I only want unique matches in my directories (i.e. disregarding any directory, display unique matches only).

So I ran grep -r asdf | sort --unique. However – this does not work since the directory names are different (dir1/a.txt asdf and dir2/a.txt asdf).

I didn't see an option (I tried e.g. grep -riol) to exclude directories and I guess that barely makes sense for the scope of the function. Can I somehow cut-away the directories and only show the matched filename + match (possibly without a mind/universe-bending regex/sed/…)?

Best Answer

I think with the default capabilities of grep there in no way of doing this.

You could go with something like this, which is just a "small" regex:

grep -r asdf | sed '#^.*/##' | sort --unique

Note: This approach will not work if the search-pattern contains a /

Related Solutions

POSIX-compliant recursive grep with no errors for inaccessible directories

To make grep print only the file name, pass the -l option. To search for a substring rather than a regular expression, pass the -F option.

To search recursively for files whose name matches a certain pattern, use find with the -type f and -name PATTERN primaries. Use -exec to invoke grep.

find . -name '*.sas' -type f -exec grep -F -l 'Carhart' {} +

If you want to avoid errors from directories that you aren't allowed to traverse, you can either use -perm, -user and -group to analyze permissions (which is difficult to get right, and won't work if you have ACL), or call test (which is slowed because it's an external program, but is more reliable).

find . -type d ! -exec test -r {} -a -x {} \; -prune -o \
       -name '*.sas' -type f -exec test -r {} \; -exec grep -F -l 'Carhart' {} +

Excluding nested directories with grep

It seems that --exclude-dir is only compared against the basename of the path, ie the current subdir. So path/to/file will never match dir "file", but only --exclude-dir=file will, or a glob version eg --exclude-dir=*ile.

The usual alternative is to use find, eg if it handles option -path:

find . -path ./path/to/file -prune -o -type f -exec egrep -l 'hello' {} +

The pattern after -path has to match the path including your starting dir, but you can use globs to simplify, eg '*path*file*', where * matches / as well.

Otherwise, you can resort to find | sed | xargs egrep.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

POSIX-compliant recursive grep with no errors for inaccessible directories

Excluding nested directories with grep

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